


Fallen Angel

by cfcureton



Series: Angel [2]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternative Universe - No Island, But angry sex can be fun right?, F/M, Felicity will jump to conclusions, Oliver will be an idiot, Sexy Times
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-30
Updated: 2020-06-27
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:48:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 38,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22478167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cfcureton/pseuds/cfcureton
Summary: Oliver and Felicity’s happiness in Starling City is disrupted when John Diggle asks for Oliver’s help on a case. What they uncover will threaten the couple’s relationship and both their lives.
Relationships: Oliver Queen/Felicity Smoak
Series: Angel [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1617265
Comments: 119
Kudos: 176





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The end of Arrow has inspired me to revisit old stories and continue their journeys. Of all the fics I played around with, the sequel for Angel took off immediately, so here we go.
> 
> I left all the good stuff (wink) til the very end last time, so I’ve indulged in a lot of good stuff right from the get go this time. As always, I love hearing from you. Happy reading!

Oliver squinted into the setting sun as he cruised out of downtown on the interstate through Friday rush hour traffic. He was excited for the weekend, not because it had been a long week—though it had been—but because Sunday would mark one year since he and Felicity had rolled into Starling City, a new couple looking for a fresh start. 

And what a year it had been.

His blonde IT genius was a rising superstar at Palmer Tech, allowing her the financial freedom to purchase a townhouse in a quiet suburb they now called home. The SCPD had welcomed him back with open arms, and aside from his longtime partner retiring a month ago and the prospect of meeting his replacement Monday morning, Oliver was glad he’d come back. Going to work without worrying about remembering a cover identity—and subsequently not dying—was a nice change. 

Felicity had beat him home by just a few minutes; less than five, if the state of her wardrobe was any indication. She paused as he walked through the door, one hand fishing inside the sleeve of her blouse for the strap to the bra she had already unhooked and was ready to whip out and toss somewhere in the living room. It was a daily ritual.

“Hey.”

“Hey, you.” She grinned, but he couldn’t be sure it wasn’t meant for the bra that clipped the lampshade next to the sofa on its way to the floor. “How was your day?”

“Ungh,” he groaned, snagging her waist and drawing her against him. “Murdery.”

“Not again.” Felicity sighed as he nuzzled into her hair. She snaked her arms up around his neck and her newly-liberated breasts pressed against his chest. He felt the familiar tug of arousal and realized it had been days since they’d done more than exchange a quick kiss hello or goodbye. He was hungry, but not enough to overrule the sudden need he had for her. 

His hands strayed south as he covered her mouth with his in the dirtiest kiss he could manage while also working the zipper to her skirt, but Felicity solved the problem by pushing away from him long enough to take care of business herself. In seconds she had shimmied out of it and tossed it somewhere in the vicinity of the bra. Without the skirt, the only thing standing in the way of mutual orgasms was a tiny black thong. Oliver almost swallowed his tongue.

“It’s slated for the laundry anyway,” she explained of the jettisoned skirt in a voice gone husky. He had lived with her long enough to understand how significant this was; laundry day for Felicity included spreadsheets.

He wasted no time lifting her high enough to encourage her legs to wrap around his waist as he strode purposefully toward their bedroom. The tiny portion of his brain that wasn’t currently thinking about sex was thankful for the home gym they were slowly creating in the basement. Even without nightly pole routines, his girlfriend still had muscular legs and a core of steel. It made him work harder on his own fitness just to keep up.

Oliver’s finger hooked inside the flimsy bit of black fabric as he turned and sat on the bed, fully intending to rip it off and be inside her before his clothes were completely removed, but at the first tug against the elastic Felicity yelped in protest and scrambled off his lap.

“Oh no you don’t. These are new!”

He huffed a surprised laugh, but let her take them off while he watched, his hands busy with his own belt and zipper. Her blouse came off over her head in one move, leaving her hair perfectly unruly. The next thing he knew she was working the buttons on his shirt and climbing back onto his naked thighs. Clearly neither of them was interested in foreplay. 

She sank down on him so fast it made him see stars.

“Fuck,” he hissed.

“Exactly.” 

Felicity set the pace, frantic and fast, working him up so quickly he was sure he’d be over the edge before she got there, but in under a minute she was moaning his name and shuddering, completely undone. Oliver dropped his hands to her hips and thrust hard twice more to finish, grunting his release while the muscles of her thighs quivered around him.

He groaned in ecstasy and fell backwards on the bed, careful to keep his hands on her so she wouldn’t tumble off his dick. The ceiling was sort of fascinating; he blinked at it while he waited for the blood to resume normal routes through his body. 

“Wow.” He heard Felicity huff a surprised laugh. “We shouldn’t wait so long next time. One of us might’ve died.”

“I don’t think that’s a thing...but we probably shouldn’t take any chances, just in case.”

She chuckled and he felt her hands roam his chest lazily. She was shifting forward, and part of him—namely the part still inside her—wondered if a second round might be in the cards, when the doorbell rang.

“What the—“

“Pizza!” she exclaimed brightly. Oliver’s hopes were dashed, but his stomach was elated. Felicity lifted off him and he bit back a whimper. Pizza did sound damn good, though.

“Sit tight. I got it.” He snagged his sweatpants off the doorknob to the closet on his way out of the bedroom. Under no circumstances would a teenage delivery boy be allowed to see his sex-rumpled girlfriend. 

“I want you again for dessert,” she informed him matter-of-factly as she disappeared into the bathroom. Oliver had to hide his reaction behind the door as he paid for dinner. 

———————————————————

“So,” Felicity began around a bite of pizza, “new partner Monday.”

Oliver retrieved a stray black olive out of the box and then wiped his mouth.

“No comment, Mr Queen?”

The look he gave her from under his lashes said it all.

Felicity settled a hand on his forearm. “Look, I know you don’t like playing with others—“

“Hey!” he protested, though it made him smile.

“—but give this new guy a chance. You might be surprised.”

Oliver grunted a grudging consent and she squeezed his arm once. 

“Go watch sports or something. I’m gonna get a head start on Laundry Day.”

——————————————————

His phone rang while he was sprawled out on the couch, a spot already designated next to him for Felicity as soon as she got back from the basement. He shifted his attention from Sports Center long enough to check the caller ID and then scooped it up to answer before it went to voicemail.

“John, hey.”

“Hi, Oliver. You got a minute?”

“Absolutely. How ya been?” Oliver muted the tv and sat up, wondering if Felicity would be back in time to say hi or if he should call for her. Neither of them had spoken to Diggle for several months.

“I’m headed out your way for a case and thought I’d get in touch. Try to get together, maybe.”

“Yeah, that’d be great, John.” He twisted to look at the door to the basement. “When will you be out?”

“Monday, midday. I’ll call you when I have a better handle on my schedule.”

“Great. Sounds good. You wanna say hi to Felicity?” Oliver half rose from the couch to run the phone downstairs, but something in John’s tone stopped him.

“Not right now. I, uh, I’ve got a thing to go to. I’ll see you soon.”

“Okay.” He thought they would say goodbye, but instead there was an extended pause on the line; he could tell Dig wanted to say something else.

“Felicity...” He hesitated, and warning bells sounded in Oliver’s head. “...she isn’t stripping anymore, is she?”

Oliver’s mouth fell open. “Of course not. Not since Hub City.”

“Okay. Just thought I’d ask. Talk to you soon.”

“...Bye, John.”

He was still staring at the blank screen, deep in thought, when Felicity strolled into the living room, fussing with a messy bun on the top of her head. He looked up to watch her cross the room.

“John Diggle just called.” He tossed the phone onto the coffee table and sat back. “He’s coming out to Starling Monday, and wants to get together.”

“Great! Did he say why?” She folded a leg under her at one end of the couch.

“A case.” Oliver was still staring into space, still mulling over their conversation. Weighing his need to tell her the rest with the unease he felt.

“What.”

Trust Felicity to know there was more. Oliver looked at her.

“He asked if you were stripping.”

“Wha...why would he ask that?”

Oliver sighed, trying to shake free of his mood, making himself turn off the cop senses and enjoy the first night of the weekend. 

“I’ll worry about that later. Right now...” he leaned across the couch and snagged Felicity’s waist so he could drag her to him “...I want dessert.”

——————————————————-

Monday morning came way too soon. Oliver caught the alarm on his phone two minutes before it was set to go off and dropped it over the side of the mattress with a huff, letting his arm fall back across Felicity’s waist and drag her even closer. He burrowed back into her with a sigh. 

“Ol’ver.” It was muffled by the covers. “Gotta get up.”

He mumbled a no, grumpy, and snuggled closer, which made her shake as she chuckled against him. She reached a hand back to wrap around his head and scratch into his hair. 

“Mmmm.”

“Get up.” Felicity stretched against him and his hands automatically slipped up under her tank top. “You gotta.”

“You are not making a convincing argument,” he pointed out as she wriggled and sighed, grinding on his morning wood whether she meant to or not.

“Didn’t you get enough this weekend?” she challenged, though he noticed, smugly, that she was most definitely pushing back on purpose. His hands left her breasts long enough to skate under the waistband of her pjs and she stiffened. So did he.

“We have time,” he pleaded. She kicked free of the pants and shifted onto her back to entwine her legs with his and help guide him. They both groaned when he thrust in the first time. He pressed against her clit with his fingers and her back came up off the bed.

“Ohhhhhh...”

It didn’t take long after that. Oliver slowed his pace as she came down, not ready for it to be over, keeping her on the edge while he tried to decide if he had time to give her a second, but Felicity squirmed around without releasing him to let him finish from behind and that did it. He moaned her name as he came and she sighed in return, happy. Sated. 

“Get up,” she ordered again, but there was a smile in her voice.

“I thought I just did,” he grumbled as he sat up, but there was a smile—and complete satisfaction—in his voice too.

“Love you,” she mumbled into her pillow.

Oliver stopped at the end of the bed to look at her. 

“I love you too.”

—————————————————-

His Captain met him at the precinct entrance as he strode in with a steaming cup of black coffee.

“Morning.”

Pike shot him a look which was his idea of a smile. Or maybe not.

“Play nice today, Queen.”

Oliver flashed him the smile Felicity referred to as “devastating” and kept walking. He’d known this was coming and practiced in the rear view mirror before getting out of his car.

He scanned the briefing room for any unfamiliar faces, trying not to look interested in discovering the identity of his new partner. It was best to approach this business as cool and aloof as possible, he figured. No reason to give the new guy false hope.

Pike passed him on his way to the front of the room and Oliver took that as his cue to find a seat. He sipped his coffee and flipped through the briefing with everyone else, nodding at the appropriate times and scribbling notes in the margins. He expected a moment at the end for Captain Pike to make a formal introduction, or at least acknowledge a new member on the force, but he sent them off with his usual “Good Luck, Be Safe” speech and dismissed the room.

Oliver collected his paperwork and took a large swallow of his cooling coffee; he wasn’t quite sure of protocol since Pike hadn’t brought up the new detective. He was wondering if he should swing by HR to ask when the captain cleared his throat behind him. 

“Queen, this is Drake. Your new partner.”

Oliver turned, hand out, to lock gazes with a woman. Tall, curvy in a pantsuit, and giving him a no-nonsense expression of competence and intelligence. He swallowed his first verbal reaction, then his second, and settled for a nod of acknowledgement.

“Oliver.” He gave her his hand. 

“Dinah. Nice to meet you,” she replied, husky and soft. 

“Dinah comes highly recommended from the force in Coast City. She’s done her share of undercover work, so you two have a lot in common.”

Pike didn’t say good luck before he walked away, but it was in his eyes, along with a veiled warning for Oliver to play nice.

Oliver made himself release the giant breath he was holding slowly. He did not deploy the devastating smile. 

“We should get started.”

——————————————————

The morning passed swiftly while he showed her their desk area and briefed her on his—their—current cases. Dinah was quick and concise, asking pertinent questions to get herself up to speed and avoiding small talk. Before he knew it his stomach was grumbling and his phone was buzzing in his pocket. It was John. 

“I just got in. Waiting for my bag. Can we meet for lunch?”

Oliver flicked a glance at his new partner before answering, then decided it was sink or swim time for the newbie.

“Yeah. You need a ride?”

Dig grunted a no. “Getting a rental. Name the place.” 

Oliver gave him a name and general directions before hanging up. She was purposely not looking at him as he stowed his phone, but he could tell she was paying attention. Waiting to see what he’d do next.

“You okay here?”

Dinah looked him in the eye, which set him back, but just a little. “I’m fine, thanks.” She gestured over his shoulder. “I have an orientation session after lunch anyway.”

Oliver nodded once. “Okay. See you tomorrow.”

He turned to go without waiting to hear anything back. 

————————————————————

They hardly spoke until their lunch was half gone, but not because there was nothing to say. It felt nice, sitting together again, sharing a meal. Oliver was anxious for Felicity to do this with them too.

“So, what brings you to the coast?”

John balled up his napkin and tossed it aside to grab another; the crab was fresh off the boat ten steps from their table, succulent but messy.

“Been working a case for six months now. Tracked him around the country, trying to pin him down, but he’s slippery.”

“And you’re on him for...?”

“Fraud. Embezzlement. White collar stuff.”

Oliver dropped another empty crab leg on the growing pile between them and raised an eyebrow. He could tell there was more.

John shifted back in his chair. “But as I’m building a case I’m also looking at patterns, right? His movements, his habits. And the more I look, the more I notice that something else is happening in every city this guy’s in.”

Oliver squinted as the sun broke through the clouds and waited for the punchline. John leaned forward again and lowered his voice.

“In every city he’s in, exotic dancers start showing up dead. Three, four, five at a time. Random. All over the city. No type, no pattern except it’s always the city he’s in for as long as he’s there.”

Across the table from him Oliver’s heart stuttered, thinking of Felicity. Thinking of John’s voice on the phone three days before. “He’s here. In Starling.”

“He’s remarkably good at laying a false trail but yeah, I think so. And Oliver, what he does, to them...” He didn’t finish his sentence, but he didn’t really have to. Oliver nodded once.

“What do you need from me?”

“I need your knowledge of the city, your contacts. Your eyes and ears in on this with me, Oliver.”

“Can you send me what you’ve got?”

“Yeah. Of course. But, can we keep this between us? I don’t want Felicity...”

He trailed off but Oliver knew what he wasn’t saying and nodded slowly. This would hit a little close to home for her.

“No problem. We don’t talk about my work as a general rule anyway.”

They parted soon after, John heading to the FBI office, leaving Oliver to cruise the streets of Starling and think about their conversation. He took the long way back to the precinct and tried to concentrate on his other work while he waited for the files to show up in his email inbox, but was surprised when it arrived in a large manila envelope by courier right at the end of the day. He fiddled with the clasp before slipping it under his arm unopened. His new partner was nowhere to be seen. 

Oliver grilled out and tossed a salad for dinner, then hung around the living room pretending to be absorbed by the tv until Felicity finally retreated to bed with a book. When he was sure she was settled for the night he opened the envelope and pulled out the packet of papers. 

Felicity wasn’t a stripper anymore. She was safe. So she didn’t need to find out there might be a serial killer loose in Starling City.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes an update takes a month, sometimes it takes 24 hours. Trust me, kids, none of us knows how this works for me. But I do know I am loving this story and where it’s going, so that is very good news as far as updates are concerned. Thanks for reading!

His name was Adrian Chase, but also Simon Morrison. There were other names in the report, almost a dozen altogether, probably a couple John hadn’t found yet. Oliver stopped processing what he was reading after his eyes jumped to the crime scene photos and his stomach twisted in both anger and fear. He was no stranger to death in all its forms, but this...well, at least he knew why John didn’t want to talk about it.

He left the photos and focused down on the details of the report, looking for patterns like his friend had before him, trying to connect additional dots. It kept him up well past midnight. 

He made sure to put everything back in the envelope and stash it out of sight before making his way through the darkened bedroom to brush his teeth. Felicity was a small shadowy lump under the covers; Oliver longed to pull her close and tell her he was worried as he slid in beside her, but he didn’t want to wake her and he couldn’t tell her why. 

He woke once, gasping and sweating, with a nightmare he couldn’t remember but understood in context anyway. His head turned automatically to Felicity; she slept on, undisturbed. Sweat dried on his skin as he stared at the ceiling and tried to calm his racing pulse. She was here. She was safe. This wasn’t going to affect her. He repeated it over and over in his head for what felt like hours until he finally drifted back to sleep.

The smell of coffee finally woke him: he’d overslept. Felicity had not only beaten him out of bed, she was filling her travel mug, ready to walk out the door.

“Mornin’ sleepyhead,” she chirped. “You were impossible to wake up. How late did you stay up?”

Oliver rubbed both hands over his face as he shuffled toward her and the coffee maker. But mostly the coffeemaker. He felt like crap.

When she realized she wasn’t going to get an answer Felicity stepped to the side, giving him access to the java. “Oh! I completely forgot to ask last night. How was the new partner?”

Oliver frowned in confusion as he fumbled after a mug in the cabinet. And then it came back to him.

“S’fine.”

“Ookay.” Her heels clicked rapidly out of the kitchen and he heard the rustling of her computer bag being hiked onto her shoulder. “How ‘bout I ask you again tonight when you’re human again?”

Her tone was flat; not mad, but sure as hell not happy. The click of the door closing was her way of saying goodbye.

“Shit,” he muttered into the mug. 

—————————————————————-

The precinct was already buzzing with its usual activity by the time he rolled in. He’d missed the briefing. His desk was empty, but even the knowledge that his new partner was even later than him didn’t brighten his mood. Oliver laid John’s envelope of evidence to the side and stood for a moment shuffling papers. Collecting his thoughts. 

“Here,” she said, passing a cup of black coffee under his nose while his head was bent. 

Oliver’s eyebrows ticked up. “It’s not good to be this late on your second day.”

“I beat the Captain in this morning,” she corrected him mildly. 

He accepted the coffee and sniffed it before taking a tentative sip.

Dinah snorted. “It’s not poisoned.”

Oliver smirked at that, even as he made a happy noise at the back of his throat over the flavor. “How did you know?”

How he liked his coffee, he meant. She shrugged.

“I asked around.”

Oliver nodded once into his cup and took a bigger sip. “It’s good.”

He scratched a hand through his hair as he prioritized the day’s work in his head, and for a few minutes their only conversation involved their cases. But he caught her fingers sliding under the flap of the manila envelope from the corner of his eye as he scribbled notes and his hand snaked out to move hers away. Gently, but with absolute purpose. 

“Don’t.”

It was quiet for a breath. “What is it?”

Then it was his turn to take a breath. “It’s personal.”

He felt her eyes flick to him but she shrugged lightly and let it go. Off Dinah’s right shoulder a fellow detective breezed by with a finger gun for each of them. 

“Hey, Kids. Call just came in. Double homicide in Granite Heights. You’re up.”

Oliver glanced at his new partner. “You ready?”

Dinah’s eyebrows lifted and dropped decisively. “Absolutely.”

——————————————————————

It wasn’t until they were a block out from the crime scene that Oliver realized how close they were to the jewelry store. It was a hole in the wall, a mom and pop place that sat in the same strip mall as Felicity’s favorite Chinese restaurant. Which also happened to be a hole in the wall.

She’d spotted the ring a few weeks before, displayed in the window and backlit on a piece of sun-bleached velvet that had definitely seen better decades. She didn’t say anything, just pulled him to a stop with her arm through his and stared at it with her lip caught in her teeth, the exact same way she looked at mint chip ice cream in the freezer aisle of the grocery. That’s how he knew she loved it.

He’d come back and purchased it a week later during his lunch break, when he was supposed to be meeting up with the rest of the department for a send off lunch for his partner. He showed up late and couldn’t care enough to even apologize. 

They’d kept it while he figured out how to size it, which ultimately bested his considerable detective skills; Felicity didn’t own a single ring that he knew of. In the end he broke down and called her mother.

He was still a little deaf in that ear.

Oliver checked the rear view mirror before pulling into the turn lane at the stoplight to the apartment complex. “You mind if I run a quick errand on our way back?”

Dinah shook her head without looking up from her phone.

—————————————————————-

It was past lunch by the time they finished at the scene. The fire trucks had pulled out an hour before, and only two black and whites remained, their lights flashing, the last remaining evidence that anything had even happened in apartment 2B. This would cause a stir for a couple of days and then the residents would go back to life as usual. That’s how it always worked.

“We should grab lunch.”

He said it as they were getting back into his unmarked sedan, the one he’d been assigned a year before, announcing his return to a job he realized he’d missed. She couldn’t know it, but the offer to share a meal was Oliver’s way of saying he approved of the work he’d just seen her do. 

“Sounds good. I’m starving.” Dinah flashed him a quick grin; still wanting to eat after spending the better part of the morning up close and personal with two corpses said something about them both. The corners of Oliver’s mouth lifted briefly in acknowledgement.

“You like tacos?”

The food truck was one of his favorites and, conveniently, always parked in the strip mall lot on Tuesdays. The day was sunny and warm, letting them know summer was well on its way; Oliver shucked his jacket and rolled his sleeves as they ordered. 

“Sorry we have to stand.” 

Dinah shrugged, the paper tray of tacos held under her chin as she took her first bite. Oliver leaned back against the side of the car and crossed his feet at the ankles. Neither of them spoke through the first taco.

“You settling in?”

She wiped her fingers awkwardly before answering. “I have an aunt in Starling. I’m staying with her until I find something.”

Oliver nodded into his next bite.

“You have any recommendations?”

“The west side is nice. We have a townhouse in a decent neighborhood. Close to everything.” Good schools, he thought but didn’t say. He and Felicity had never discussed it.

He didn’t miss her eyes flick to his left hand. A brief, knowing smile lit his face.

“Not yet. That’s the errand.”

Dinah smiled back. On her typically business-like exterior it was transformative. “Well. I guess congratulations are in order.”

Oliver swallowed his bite and huffed a laugh and then—surprising himself—grinned. “I haven’t asked yet. And I have some ground to recover first, if this morning was any indication.”

He realized he’d overshared and pressed his lips together. She took another bite instead of asking for elaboration. 

Maybe they’d both realized it.

Their sodas were sitting on the roof of the car, and as Oliver twisted at the waist to retrieve his he saw her eyes catch on the puckered seam of skin that traveled the length of his left arm. He made eye contact with her, permission to ask.

“You get that on the job?”

He nodded once into his taco tray. “Hub City. Little over a year ago.”

Dinah stood straight suddenly. “You’re the one who took down Slade Wilson. Shit! I’m...I don’t know what to say right now.”

Oliver kept his eyes down, but he wasn’t displeased.

“Our whole department followed that story from Coast City like it was the OJ Simpson trial.” She shook her head in wonder before her eyes flicked to his arm again. “Did it hurt?”

Oliver’s eyes unfocused briefly as he thought about driving one handed through the night with white-hot pain strobing his vision and a mostly-naked Felicity balled up and weeping in the seat next to him. Exhaustion, and fear, and the bang of a gun shot exploding inside a crappy hotel room. Two weeks in a hospital bed. Letting Sara go.

“Not as much as some things,” he decided quietly.

——————————————————————

Dinah waited in the car while he ran in to pick up the ring. He didn’t offer to show it to her; it didn’t seem appropriate, somehow.

She volunteered to do the paperwork from the morning, so once she was busy across from him at her own desk Oliver slid the packet from John close and got to work in the SCPD database. He could get answers more easily than Diggle, he reasoned, and without the necessary warrants. 

After an hour he began to wish he COULD tell Felicity; she was so much faster at all this.

John texted in the middle of the afternoon to ask if it was too late to make plans for dinner, but Oliver immediately invited him to come over and then fired off a message to Felicity to let her know. The thumbs up emoji was her only reply. She was probably too busy to elaborate, he hoped with a sigh. 

By rights he needed to stay late to cover the hour lost at the beginning of the day, but he was already beginning to fidget thinking of the shopping trip he needed to make before he could pull dinner together. He looked up and caught Dinah studying him.

“You doing it tonight?” She meant the proposal, presumably.

“No. Why?”

“You look nervous.”

“I’m not nervous.” Oliver pushed away from his desk and grabbed his jacket and the envelope on Chase. If she’d noticed, it was time to get the hell out. Dinah raised one eyebrow and smirked, and for just a second Oliver grinned. “I’m not.”

“Okay. I believe you.” She clearly didn’t. 

“See you tomorrow.”

“See ya.”

—————————————————————

John showed up before Felicity, and Oliver mentally breathed a sigh of relief. Hopefully with their old friend here the tension between them from the morning would dissipate on its own and they wouldn’t have to talk about it. It was the coward’s way out, no question, but Oliver wasn’t too proud to use any available strategy to keep the peace. Especially knowing what he did about why Dig was in town.

The whole thing was beginning to give him a headache. 

Felicity kicked her shoes off at the door and launched herself into John’s arms with no warning at all, but he was more than ready to catch her. A lump caught in Oliver’s throat as he watched them. They whispered something to each other briefly before Felicity landed a kiss against his cheek, and then John was lowering her the considerable distance back to the floor.

“What’s he feeding you?” she asked him, and turned her grin on Oliver. It made his heart soar.

“Chicken Cordon Bleu,” Oliver said softly, his face brightening into a smile. He loved her so damn much it hurt.

John stayed late, through two bottles of wine and a store bought cheesecake that made Felicity moan so loud and dirty Oliver thought he might not be able to get up to see their guest out. At the door he watched his girlfriend disappear in a hug under John’s giant arms, and then the FBI agent shook Oliver’s hand and gave him a look above her head that said he’d be in touch soon. About other things.

By the time he’d finished cleaning up in the kitchen Felicity was asleep.

Oliver felt both disappointed and relieved.

He made sure to be up first the next morning, and even made breakfast. Felicity looked surprised and happy, and nothing was said about the previous morning. He snagged her arm to pull her back for a kiss as they parted at their vehicles and she gave him a quick peck and a smile.

His good mood lasted until he got to work.

“Queen. Got another one for ya. Butcher job in the Glades.”

Dinah caught his eye and raised a brow. Game.

“Yeah, okay. We’re on it.”

The other detective jerked his chin at them with a grin. “Make sure you stay for the lunch buffet. The vic was a stripper.”

Oliver’s blood went cold.

————————————————————

They didn’t usually roam so far from Palmer Tech for lunch, but it was Andrea’s birthday and she wanted Chinese, and since Felicity was driving she picked her own favorite spot. The chatter from the car full of work friends soothed her bad mood from the morning, and she was just thinking of texting—maybe even sexting—a certain someone during lunch to show him there were no hard feelings over his grumpiness when Marisol, in the back seat, raised her voice over the others.

“Hey, Felicity. Isn’t that Oliver?”

Felicity could only glance at first, but then she slowed down as they passed his brown cop sedan parked in front of his favorite food truck. Everything froze for a second as each detail of the scene came into focus: the breeze ruffling his pant legs, his relaxed stance against the side of the car, the smile on his face. He hardly ever grinned like that. 

The woman...well. Felicity knew her mouth was hanging open at how gorgeous she was, tall and tanned and able to eat a hard shell taco without wearing it, apparently. Some girls got all the luck. She made herself drive on through the stunned silence of her friends, find a place to park, and walk into the Chinese restaurant with her head held high. 

Her poor heart managed to fake it for John’s sake, but after he left she couldn’t disappear fast enough. 

She was still awake when Oliver came to bed, but she didn’t let him know.


	3. Chapter 3

The name of the club was forgettable. Oliver vaguely registered the street they were on and the crowd of bystanders milling outside on the sidewalk. The drive over had only increased his dread about what he was about to see; it wasn’t that he thought Dig didn’t know his job, but he’d hoped, just this once, that his friend was wrong.

  
A tarp had been hastily erected across the alley between the club and the building next door by the fire department. Oliver parked at the end of the line of black and whites and he and Dinah ducked under the police tape and approached the cop standing guard. He was a veteran, a good guy Oliver remembered from his previous stint with the SCPD. He was steady, experienced, and not prone to wisecracks.

  
“Body in the alley?”

  
The cop’s expression didn’t change. “For starters.”

  
Oliver winced, because he knew it wasn’t a joke, and with a quick glance at his partner reached out to pull the tarp to the side.

  
After the bright sunlight, the artificially darkened alley made them slow until their eyes could adjust. The flash on the CSI’s camera popped over the crime scene and Oliver blinked once. He studied the evidence with the attachment borne from a lot of years looking at human body parts, knowing in this instance he’d have to think of these bits of flesh and bone as just meat and no longer a person. It was the only way to cope, a trick he’d learned from a Medical Examiner a much younger and less mature version of himself had once loved and lost.

  
Dinah was silent beside him; he didn’t look at her.

  
The investigator glanced up at them in acknowledgement, then tipped his head further down the alley. “It keeps going,” he said, in the way a regular person would talk about the line to the Matterhorn at Disney. Oliver nodded once and moved on.

  
In all, the remains of Jennie Nichols, aka Spiritt with two t's, spread the length of the alley and into the strip club through the employee entrance, the last of her lying at the entrance to the girls’ dressing room. Oliver walked it from one end to the other and then back, thinking about blood spatters and weapons, and the time it would take one person to do this much damage. Dinah trailed him like a shadow, silent and watchful, but when he stopped to ask the manager questions, she disappeared purposefully back the way they’d come in. Checking on something, he suspected.

  
The manager, a fat sweaty guy who was holding it together though he was currently a pale shade of green, didn’t have much info except that he thought she was the last one out after the club closed at one am, and he was the first one in at nine am to unlock for the cleaning crew. He had security cameras, but he’d recently gone with a new surveillance company and they had picked last night to remotely install their upgrades, taking the entire system down for the night. Oliver swallowed a swear word.

  
Dinah drifted back to his side as he finished with the guy’s statement and turned him over to a uni for safekeeping.

  
“What are you thinking?’ he asked quietly.

  
She didn’t answer at once and he finally turned to look at her. “That there’s something deliberate about the placement of…her. But I haven’t put my finger on what yet.” Oliver made himself look back down at the chunk of flesh in front of the dressing room door and nodded once.

  
“Ask the CSI to go up on the roof and get some shots from above.”

  
Dinah studied him a second, calculating, then left to comply.

  
They stayed on another three hours to oversee the removal of the meticulously catalogued and packaged remains, Oliver reminding the techs repeatedly not to forget any camera angles or samples.

  
Though it was well into the afternoon, neither of them suggested lunch when they finally got back into his car.

  
Oliver turned the sedan around and merged into traffic silently. He didn’t want to eat, but he could sure as hell use a drink. He felt his partner looking at him but waited for the next red light before he acknowledged her.

  
“What?”

  
She took a second to answer, like she was weighing her words. “You know something.”

  
The light changed and he drove on, doing his five-point check of the mirrors like a responsible citizen, which had the added bonus of helping him avoid the distraction of coming clean to her.

  
“Oliver.”

  
It was the first time he’d heard her say his name, and it made him pause. This was it. She was his partner, whether he liked it or not. If Adrian Chase had committed this murder, thus beginning his reign of terror in Starling City, she needed to know. The envelope was shoved between his seat and the console; he extracted it without looking and handed it to her.

  
Dinah lifted the flap with a long glance at him but he didn’t look over as she pulled the packet of papers out and began flipping through it.

  
“Oliver…this is…holy shit.”

  
Oliver glanced at the rearview mirror but didn’t really feel like a verbal acknowledgment was necessary.

  
“How long have you known about this?” Her voice was faint with shock.

  
He sighed. “It was given to me by an FBI agent by the name of John Diggle. The day before yesterday.”

  
Oliver heard her release a long breath. “My first day.”

  
He didn’t think that warranted a response either.

  
“God, when were you going to tell me about this?”

  
Oliver huffed a sigh. “We weren’t sure he was even in town—”

  
“You said this was personal. When I asked to see it. Personal? Were you—” her hands dropped into her lap with a soft slap—“hoping to catch him solo? To keep all the glory for yourself?”

  
“Dinah—”

  
“I don’t—”

  
“DINAH!"

  
Her mouth snapped shut and her eyes went wide. Oliver swung the big car aggressively into the nearest parking lot and threw it into park before turning to look at her straight on. He blew out one breath, then another.

  
“You know that’s not why.”

  
“Then why?”

  
His eyes dropped to his lap. “John worked with me on the Slade Wilson case. John, and my girlfriend. Felicity. The three of us. We have…a history.”

  
“So that makes it okay to keep a secret about it? Somebody DIED last night, Oliver, in a very awful way. What if this information could’ve prevented that?”

  
“John approached me on a hunch that Chase was headed this way. He doesn’t even have definitive proof that the killer IS Chase!” Oliver realized he was shouting and pulled his lips in while he breathed heavily through his nose in an effort to calm down. His volume was under control when he continued. “We still don’t. Not for sure. But now you know as much as we do, and we’ll figure out if Chase is our guy. And then we’ll stop him.”

  
They stared at each other for several seconds.

  
“Are you going to help me do this?”

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Felicity’s mother had been right: everything DID look better after a good night’s sleep.

  
She’d worried at first that she wouldn’t be able to, sleep, that is, but once Oliver was lying next to her, his breathing deep and even, her own eyelids had grown heavy and her night was surprisingly restful. She woke to the sounds of Oliver working in the kitchen, making a racket even though she could tell he was trying to be quiet. He couldn’t help his overwhelming need to clean as he went; she suspected it was his way of keeping a bit of order within a life that could otherwise become overwhelming.

  
He was sweet and attentive over breakfast, and even packed a lunch for her of leftover chicken and her favorite kind of salad. By the time he pulled her back for a goodbye kiss she’d convinced herself whatever she’d seen in that parking lot was a misunderstanding, and as soon as she saw him again, she would ask him and he’d explain everything.

  
Her work wives were already hovering near her desk when she stepped off the elevator; Marisol was swiveling back and forth in her chair. She exploded out of the seat and met her halfway.

  
“Well? What happened? Who was she? Did he confess?”

  
Felicity brushed by her gently, determined to keep hold of the happy despite their meddling curiosity.

  
She thought she might get away with no answer at all, but three expectant faces held her accountable for an explanation. Felicity sighed in mock exasperation.

  
“We had last minute company from out of town who stayed late. I…I didn’t get a chance to ask him.” She shrugged nonchalantly, hoping she sounded confident in that answer. Five minutes ago, she HAD been.

  
Marisol made a face that said her excuse was not going to satisfy them. “My sister said she knew her husband was cheating when he started making her breakfast every morning.”

  
Felicity took a moment to stow her computer bag under her desk and, while she was down there, assess her composure, because suddenly her heart was beating so hard, she was sure it was visible through her shirt. She sat up and made herself swivel to face them.

  
“Oliver wouldn’t cheat,” she assured them with a voice she did her best to keep steady.

  
None of them were convinced, she was sure, but one by one they drifted away to get the day started.

  
There was a small photo she always kept on her desk; a picture of them with their arms around each other on the beach in Hawaii. Felicity moved it a little closer to her monitor and got to work.

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

John met him for coffee in a donut shop, because they both appreciated the irony. Oliver heaved himself across the booth with a giant sigh.

  
“I was right, wasn’t I.”

  
The look Oliver gave him said it all.

  
“Son of a bitch.” John ran his hands up over his head. “We have to tell Felicity.”

  
Oliver shut his eyes, extremely tired, all of a sudden. “John, why? He kills strippers. She’s an IT specialist for a Fortune 500. She’s completely safe.”

  
“She needs to know what we’re working on, Oliver. This could get bad, man. You remember what happened the last time we kept secrets from her.”

  
Oliver snorted. “We were both undercover, Dig. We’re lucky revealing our secrets that time didn’t get us killed.”

  
“Still.”

  
Their coffee order was delivered to the table, but after one sip Oliver’s stomach twisted.

  
“Look,” he began, giving up the idea of drinking it to simply rotate the cup on the table with his fingers, “clearly it’s time to tell my department and get the rest of your guys in here. But beyond telling her we’re collaborating on a case I just don’t think she needs the details.”

  
“Because she won’t understand?”

  
Oliver’s temper suddenly got the better of him. “No John, because she’ll understand TOO MUCH. Felicity hates mysteries, and if she thinks there’s any way she can help—and she will—she won’t stop until she uncovers everything about this case. And whether we like it or not, eventually she’ll see those photos. The photos of those girls…” He trailed off, sick to death of talking. Sick to death of death.

  
It was quiet for a minute as Oliver studied his coffee and Diggle studied him.

  
“Okay, man. We’ll play it your way. But you know how she gets when she thinks you’re keeping something—”

  
“I know, Dig.” Oliver sighed. “I know.”

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Oliver walked in the door determined to come clean, at least about working on the case with Diggle, but Felicity was quiet and distracted through dinner, and breaking in on her thoughts felt like an intrusion. The only conversation she’d initiated was to ask how his new partner was working out. Oliver thought of the case again and memories of the crime scene assaulted his senses and nearly made him push his plate away. He only managed to finish eating by answering in one-word sentences. Her own silence left him uneasy, and as soon as dinner was over, she seemed almost eager to be somewhere else.

  
They skated around each other all evening, polite and distant, both of them secretly assessing every touch and expression, which only bewildered Oliver and gave Felicity a headache. Despite the pep talk she’d given herself all the way home in the car, when it came time to bring up what she’d seen in front of that taco truck the words froze in her throat. If it was true, if he was being unfaithful, she wouldn’t let him stay, but she needed time to process the possibility of no longer having him in her life. This kind of grief was easier to take when you could see it coming; she’d learned that after her father left. But to process, she needed the world to slow the hell down for a minute. Just a minute.

  
By bedtime, the tense atmosphere of their house had Oliver’s teeth on edge. Sleep was going to be hard enough, after the day he’d had, so as they were passing in the hallway to their bathroom, he said fuck it, snaked an arm around her waist, and pulled her against him.

  
“Hey,” he whispered into her hair. “Are you okay?”

  
Felicity sighed and went boneless against him; his arm tightened to better support the change in weight. She didn’t speak, though, wouldn’t say what was wrong, if anything. Not for the first time, Oliver wished he could love her enough to make it better. But he already loved her more than it should be possible to love another human being, and still she sometimes retreated to places he couldn’t go.

  
She lifted her face to him, and with both of them barefoot she was just tall enough to fit her perfect nose against the hollow of his throat. She nestled against him just so and slid her arms up to rest on top of his with a bone-deep sigh.

  
“Make it better,” she pleaded in a whisper, and though he didn’t know exactly what he was fixing, Oliver definitely knew how.

  
In an instant he’d bent to scoop her up in his arms and carry her to the bed; seconds later Felicity was cocooned under the duvet with his body a warm, solid weight on hers. Grounding her. Pulling her back to him. He kept his movements small and slow, worshiping her with his hands and his mouth. Showing he loved her with every kiss and stroke of his tongue. Everything happened in a slow, floaty dream. There was no tension in her body before she came, but she cried after, and when his body didn’t stop its slow, relentless rhythm inside hers, she came again.

  
Oliver hid his face in her hair and shuddered, wanting so badly to let go and sink into her as deep as it was possible to go. He would’ve been happy, in that moment, to let her absorb him completely. Felicity already owned him, heart and soul. It would be nothing to give her his body forever too.

  
They drifted off, tangled together with the covers thrown back to compensate for the body heat, while across the room the ring waited patiently at the back of a dresser drawer. Soon, Oliver promised himself before he succumbed to sleep.

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Downtown Starling City—the not-great part—had a string of gentlemen’s clubs that catered to every taste. For a man like him it was a veritable smorgasbord. The music in this one was slow and thumping, the girls of better quality than most. He approved.

  
Last night’s work had been particularly satisfying, even with all the extra planning and labor. He lifted his chin to the server to indicate his desire for another drink and smiled to himself.

  
The next one would be even more spectacular.


	4. Chapter 4

Dinah seemed to find other things to keep her occupied at her desk the next morning, and Oliver was glad for the solitude. Despite the undeniable connection he’d felt with Felicity the night before—he hated to sound corny and say “making love”, but that had been exactly it—she was still quiet and reserved as they moved around each other getting ready for work. He allowed himself the luxury of closing his eyes and tipping his head back with a sigh. Maybe this weekend: he could make them reservations for a nice restaurant and then pop the question over chocolate souffle. With their relationship locked down, his brain would be free to concentrate on this case. He made a mental note to call Table Salt and refocused on his paperwork.

An hour later he remembered he had a partner and glanced up to see what she was doing; Dinah caught him looking and made an exasperated face.

“What?” he asked, not familiar enough with her ways to interpret the look.

Dinah sighed and frowned. “I have spent the morning looking at these photos, and there’s something…but I don’t know what. It’s pissing me off.”

Oliver stretched and suppressed a groan as he got up from his chair and came around the desk to look over her shoulder. The CSI photos from the roof he’d requested were up on her screen. He wasn’t sure if she’d magnified them or if they’d come over that way, but the parts and pieces of their vic could be seen scattered through the alley, each marked with a small white dot for easier reference.

“They can’t be random,” she muttered. “He’s too deliberate about everything else.” She groaned in frustration. “What am I missing?”

“Whatever it is, we’re both missing it. Keep at it.”

\------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The next time Oliver came up for air from the investigation, the office assistant was coming through to take lunch orders from the local deli. He picked something light, still not trusting his stomach, and heard Dinah explain she’d brought her lunch. They resumed their work without speaking.

The day passed without any additional homicide calls, which was a relief on several levels. The previous cases in Dig’s file indicated that Chase’s pattern was random but the days were never consecutive; apparently, he needed at least a day to recover between butcher jobs. Oliver’s gaze lifted from the computer screen and he stared off into space a moment. He opened a new tab on his computer and pulled up the Hub City Police Department log in screen. His tongue swiped his lips and then he tried his old password; it took a moment—long enough for him to regret the idea—but he was granted access to the HCPD database. He blew out a nervous sigh and began hunting.

He must’ve made a noise, because Dinah shifted forward in his peripheral and stared him down. He pulled his eyes away from the screen long enough to glance her way.

She didn’t speak, but her brows lifted in question.

“I don’t know if it means anything,” he said slowly, still working it out in his head, “but Chase was in Hub City last year, in the middle of everything going down with Slade.” She frowned in concentration, but waited for him to go on. Oliver shook his head faintly. “I don’t know why that would be significant, but it feels…”

“Creepy?”

He huffed an approximation of a laugh, the first time he’d felt like doing that in a while. “Well that, but that case of mine involved more than one strip club, so I’m just wondering…I don’t know.”

“If he was in one of those clubs? When you were?”

“Yeah.”

She shook her head quickly. “Don’t think like that. You had no idea. You couldn’t have known, okay?”

Oliver thought of Felicity, bringing the crowd to its feet as she flew, toned and perfect and practically naked, around a pole. Suddenly he wanted to put his fist through something. “I know,” he said instead.

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

He was crossing behind Dinah on his way back from the restroom when his attention was caught by what she was doing; Oliver slowed to a stop behind her.

She had a sheet of copy paper covered in rough pencil sketches of seemingly random designs. They seemed to be divided into sets, scattered longways across the paper, and she was sitting over them, studying them. 

“Dinah?”

She sat up straighter, maybe a bit startled, and threw a look over her shoulder at him, but just as she opened her mouth to explain he got it.

“Those are the body parts. You sketched them out.”

She nodded. “What do you think?”

Instead of roaming the picture like his eyes were wont to do with the aerial photos, he narrowed down his focus to each group of symbols. She’d drawn the bits of flesh and bone as simple lines, interpretations of the otherwise macabre models. They were almost glyphs, roughly curved and connecting. Definitely related in some way. Purposeful.

Oliver felt his stomach flip.

“It’s a message.”

Dinah looked back at him again, nodding and thinking, wanting him to tell her what to do next.

Oliver was already reaching for his phone.

“Can you make me a copy of this?”

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

They set up dinner again; Oliver let Felicity know John was coming over and left work fifteen minutes early to get a head start on tidying up and starting dinner; pasta sounded good, and he could whip it up without going to the store. The townhouse was quiet in that way a house is when it’s been sitting empty all day. He dumped his wallet, keys, and phone on the table by the door on his way to get changed into jeans and a Henley, then pushed up his sleeves and got to work in the kitchen. He heard the door open and close at the accustomed time for Felicity to be home, but only silence after that.

“Who’s Dinah?”

Her voice surprised him, not because he didn’t know she was there but because she was so close. He started and turned, one hand holding the big pasta pot as it filled under the faucet. Felicity had his phone in the palm of her hand; the front of it was lit up with a text. From Dinah, if he was interpreting this conversation correctly. Felicity’s face, in contrast, was very, very blank.

“Hey. You surprised me.”

She continued to stare. Oliver turned off the water.

“Dinah is my new partner, Felicity. Didn’t I tell you?”

There was a breath of silence. “About the partner, yes. That she’s a she? No.”

He continued his path to the stove with the pot and concentrated on lighting the burner. Meanwhile, his heart rate kicked up a warning.

“It was a surprise for me too. She’s a transplant from Coast City. She seems competent.”

“Competent.”

His eyes darted left and right once. “Yes.” Oh. Shit.

He watched her slap the phone down on the counter more aggressively than she would normally treat expensive electronics, and schooled his features not to react. She turned away and left the room and he pushed out a long sigh as quietly as he could. Then he followed her.

“Felicity—”

“We have a guest coming for dinner. I have to change.” She sounded almost weary. 

The door closed gently, but in his face nonetheless.

Oliver stared at the door, raised his hand to knock even, but the memory of Felicity’s reaction to finding out he’d offered her up to Slade Wilson on a silver platter made him pause. Pursuit wouldn’t have been welcomed then, and it wasn’t welcome now. He turned away to finish dinner.

Once the pasta was in the boiling water, he checked his phone; Dinah had indeed left a text, and an attachment. “Drew the previous crime scene up too,” he read, which was presumably the attachment. Oliver opened it with a glance toward the bedroom, but it appeared Felicity would be staying in there until John showed up. The drawing was similar to the one she’d done for the Starling City crime; pencil lines, some straight, some curved, clearly connected and naggingly familiar. He studied it for so long he almost burned the garlic bread.

As Oliver had suspected, Felicity didn’t emerge from their bedroom until John rang the doorbell. She smiled and raised on her tiptoes to give him a peck on the cheek, but she didn’t engage in small talk. When she retreated to the kitchen with the bottle of wine he brought, John shot Oliver a look that clearly said “What did you do?!” Oliver managed to shrug and look guilty at the same time.

Dinner was half over before Felicity leaned her elbows on the table and smiled sweetly at Diggle. 

“So John, why are you here?” She dropped a hand lightly over his. “Not that I’m complaining. Just…” She shrugged. Don’t lie to me like my boyfriend is doing right now, that look was saying. Oliver kept his eyes straight ahead.

“I’m here on a case, and I’ve asked Oliver to help me.”

Her smile never faltered. “And is Oliver’s new partner helping too?” She batted her eyelashes. John frowned, understandably confused. Oliver swallowed hard.

“Felicity…”

She ignored him, but did switch tacks.

“So, what’s the case? Another international drug lord?”

John sat back, going for relaxed, but only managing to come off as faintly nervous. “White collar stuff, mostly. I’ve been chasing him around the country.”

“And now he’s here in Starling.”

John nodded, still unsure where this conversation was headed. 

“Well,” she said, sweeping up her wine glass and holding it out for a wary Oliver to refill, “I was just assigned a huge project for work, so I’m going to take this fantastic wine and get a start on it. You two have fun on your case.”

She swept out of the room with a sway in her hips that made Oliver stare. God, she was sexy when she was mad.

Dig sat back with a low whistle of surprise. “What. Was. That?”

Oliver groaned, but softly. “My new partner has apparently caused some friction.”

John folded his arms and frowned, in full-on protective mode; Oliver knew the signs well. “What’s wrong with him?”

“Her.”

“Oh. I see.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I’m sure you have a brilliant plan to make it up to her.”

Oliver thought of the ring box, but kept it to himself.

“What did you want to show me?”

Oliver got up to retrieve the file and opened it to the page of markings from the latest crime scene.

“My new partner did this. What do you think?”

John studied the paper. “What is it? The body parts?”

“Exactly.” Oliver nodded once and shifted forward to point. “We think it’s some kind of message.”

John’s head tipped this way and that, trying to make sense of it, while Oliver pulled up the text photo on his phone and laid it next to the paper.

“This is the one previous.”

John hummed thoughtfully. “It almost looks like letters. A language, maybe. I just can’t put my finger on it.”

“Looks Greek to me.”

Oliver glanced up in surprise just as the wine bottle disappeared off the table. Felicity was focused on the screenshot in front of John.

“Yeah,” Dig huffed.

“No, I mean that literally.” The wine bottle clunked back on the table and she whipped her phone from her back pocket. “That looks like Greek.”

The two men shared a look as she tapped away on the phone screen.

“See?” She flashed the phone their direction and John raised an eyebrow. She’d Google searched it and come up with the letters of the Greek alphabet. They were a near-perfect match to Dinah’s sketches.

“What’s it say?”

Felicity scrunched her nose. “It looks like it says…’Spirit’, but with an extra T at the end. That’s weird.”

Oliver felt the blood drain from his face. Across the table John ran a hand across his mouth and stared back.

“That was the crime scene before this one. The last one in Central City.”

“He was…” Oliver let the sentence drop. Beside him Felicity caught their mood and froze, uncertain.

“…telling us who his next victim was going to be,” Dig finished, a mere whisper of his deep voice.

“He’s been ten steps ahead the whole time.”

Felicity looked from one to the other of them rapidly. Her hand was back on the wine bottle, but she didn’t seem to notice.

“What does the newest one say?” Oliver was the one to ask, and the question was for Felicity. He nodded to the paper and the penciled representation of all that remained of Jennie Nichols, stripper. Felicity’s eyes flicked back and forth between the page and her phone while Oliver tried to remember to breathe. She stared at the screen for another moment, looked at John, and then flicked her gaze to Oliver, their feud temporarily forgotten.

“It looks like it says… ‘Angel’.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gentle reminder about the graphic nature of this story.  
> Thanks for all the comments! I love hearing from you.

Felicity was the only person breathing in the room. It made her skin crawl.

“White collar crime, John? Is that the story you’re sticking with?” She raised one eyebrow and waited.

John was looking at Oliver. 

“Felicity—“

She held a finger up at Oliver without looking away from John. “Spirit? Angel? You could be investigating a weird religious cult, but somehow I doubt it.” Diggle ran both hands up over his head and left them there to cup his head. But at least now he was looking her in the eye. The tension in the room was palpable; Oliver was practically vibrating with it.

“These are murder victims, aren’t they.” She looked down at the pencil marks of Greek letters. “These are their names.” Her eyes flicked back up to the former bouncer. “Or their stage names.”

Oliver was up so fast he almost tipped the chair. “Stay out of it, Felicity. This doesn’t concern you.” A growl.

He’d never moved like that around her, and for a moment she paused, considering. And then she huffed a laugh.

“You can tell me, or I can go looking for answers myself. Either way, I’ll find out.”

“Oliver.” It was a Stand Down from Dig if she’d ever heard one. Oliver didn’t stop looking at her, but his weight shifted back infinitesimally. A breath only, but it was enough. They both knew he’d blinked first. She smirked and his eyes hardened.

“Oliver.” Dig again. “It doesn’t necessarily mean...there’ve got to be lots of Angels out there.” Oliver’s eyes slid off Felicity long enough to acknowledge John. Listening. “We have to focus on that first.”

The confirmation of her guess made Felicity’s heart beat faster, but she kept her reaction off her face. She didn’t look away from Oliver’s icy blue gaze, even when John got up from the table.

“Oliver, we need to get started.”

Finding all the girls named Angel who might be the killer’s next target, he meant. He doesn’t mean me, she chanted in her head. That’s not me anymore. She didn’t think Oliver had breathed for a full minute. But his jaw flexed, and that helped Felicity make her decision.

“You have a hotel room, John?” She turned her head to look at him.

He nodded, standing as he was with his arms loose at his sides, like he might have to move quick. Because of Oliver. Because of her.

The thought sent both a bolt of fear and a thrilling shiver through her. It also pissed her off.

“Good. You have a new roommate.” Felicity looked back at Oliver. “Get out.”

The anger vanished from his eyes, leaving confusion and panic and she knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that he wasn’t really mad. He was acting like this because he loved her. And he was fucking terrified. It only steeled her resolve.

“Get. Out.”

——————————————-

She didn’t wait to make sure he complied with her order. Oliver watched Felicity snatch the wine bottle off the table and disappear down the hall to their bedroom. The door shut very, very carefully.

The click of the lock made his stomach twist into yet another knot.

“Oliver, man, we gotta get started.” John was pleading. 

“I’m not leaving.”

He heard John move a step his direction, but didn’t take his eyes off the bedroom door.

“You have to take point on finding these girls, Oliver. You have boots on the ground. I’ll stay. I can do what I need to from here.”

Silence.

“Oliver, you gotta go. She’s safe. He has no way of knowing she used to do that.”

Oliver turned his head enough for John to see his eyes. “Chase was in Hub City last year when we took down Slade.”

“What?”

“I still have access to the police data base. I found him, under an alias.” Oliver’s eyes slid back to the door. “He was there.”

Beside him, John paced two steps away and back. “That doesn’t mean he knows who she is, or that she’s here. I’ve got this. She’s safe, man. Go.”

Oliver nodded once, an acknowledgement, but he paused again at the front door.

“What if...” He looked back and his eyes flicked to the bedroom door again. He made the mistake of putting hope in his voice.

“Oh, she was serious, Oliver. Trust me.”

The two men stared each other down for several seconds before John took his wallet out and extracted a paper envelope with a hotel key card inside.

“Give her time. She’ll come around. It’s the Marriott at 5th and Oakley.” He glanced meaningfully at the sofa. “I’ll be here.”

——————————————-

Oliver’s first call from the car was to Dinah, to get her back to the station. Then he called the Captain. By the time he rolled through the doors of the precinct there was already an army of officers phoning every show club in the city, compiling a list of dancers using the name Angel, or anything close.

“We’ve found two so far,” the Detective from  
night shift informed him. “Black and whites are on their way to pick them up and get them someplace safe.”

“Got another one!” A hand waved from the back of the room and a uni jogged back to get the address. Dinah, on the phone at her desk, looked up and caught Oliver’s eye. She was dressed in jeans and white tee, and her hair was pulled up. He’d interrupted a quiet night at home with her aunt, no doubt.

Captain Pike phoned an hour later.

“I got a call that the Feds are sending people in on this, Queen.” 

Oliver winced and held his breath. Pike hated the FBI moving in on his turf.

“I hate the Feds, Queen.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“You know the lead on this one? Uh...John Diggle?”

“He’s a friend. We worked together on the Slade Wilson case.”

“I see.” There was a lot of ‘So this is YOUR fault’ in those two words. Oliver winced, tired. He’d been getting that a lot lately.

“Keep a rein on him. He there now?”

“No, he’s, uh—“ Oliver clamped his mouth shut before he could say ‘protecting my girlfriend who used to be a stripper named Angel’ and drew a breath in through his nose — “working another angle. We’re in contact, though.”

Pike grunted over the phone. “I’m going to bed. Call me if something happens.”

Oliver hung up and sat with his face in his hands for approximately four seconds. He could tell Dinah was pretending she hadn’t heard the conversation when he looked up.

They kept working until the clubs closed. A couple of Federal agents arrived, but didn’t do much. Waiting for their leader, who was sacked out on Oliver’s couch, probably. He’d prefer to be there himself, standing guard over Felicity, but Dig was right: she’d get over this and let him back in. Eventually.

Until then, there was the Marriott. 

“Everything’s buttoned up?” 

Dinah nodded. “Clubs are closed, Angels are accounted for. Patrols are on alert in those neighborhoods. Go home. I’ll stay and cover.”

“You sure?”

She tipped her head. “You need sleep. You look bad.”

Her frankness surprised a chuckle out of him. “Noted. If anything happens, call me before you call Pike.”

“Got it.”

Oliver heaved himself to his feet and headed for the hotel.

———————————————

John Diggle woke up looking at a blonde and a cup of coffee. She was perched on the coffee table in front of him, hunched forward with her knees bouncing faintly. She looked cold, or maybe lonely. Definitely guilty.

“The last time you spent the night on my couch I had to get rid of it.”

He blinked once and smiled. “This time I’m not shot and bleeding out.”

“Our luck is improving.”

He sat up and stretched; she offered him the mug but didn’t get up from her spot.

“You think he’s okay?”

John let her dangle while he sipped his coffee. “He stayed in my hotel room. If he even left the station.”

Felicity bit her lip, but didn’t say anything. 

He sighed. “Felicity, does this have anything to do with Oliver’s new partner?”

“No. I mean, she is gorgeous, but...” she concentrated on picking an invisible thread from her sleep pants and John tipped his head, asking her to look at him. “He wouldn’t cheat. I know that.”

“So what is it?”

“This whole investigation—which I’m starting to think involves a serial killer and not white collar crimes—“ Felicity gave him a stern frown and he had the decency to look embarrassed—“it’s reminded me how much I’ve come to rely on Oliver this past year. Dig, I was never the girl who needed protection, or help keeping myself fed. What if I...” She dropped her gaze to the floor. “I don’t think he’d walk away, but if something happened to him...I don’t want to lose myself in him and have nothing left if the worst happens.”

She peeked up at him beneath a fall of hair, and John couldn’t help brushing it back off her face and cupping her chin between his fingers. When he spoke, his deep voice was as soft as velvet.

“Do you remember the day we met?”

She smiled faintly, and nodded.

“You’d come in to get your schedule, in your Tech Village uniform—“ Felicity rolled her eyes and chuckled—“looking less like a stripper than anyone I could imagine. That bouncer, the blond one who mostly worked weekends—“

“Cody.”

“Cody. That’s right. Cody had noticed you too. He was coming on to you a little bit, yes? And you handled it really well. You had it under control. And Cody’s a nice guy, so he took the hint and nothing happened. But I was there, Felicity. I made sure I was watching. Because if Cody hadn’t been a nice guy, as badass as you are, there wouldn’t have been much you could’ve done about it.”

They stared each other down as he waited for her eyes to tell him she understood.

“Oliver knows about the world, Felicity. He’s seen things you don’t ever want to think about. And his way of loving you is keeping you safe.” He grinned lopsidedly. “And fed.” 

She nodded, her eyes glistening with tears, and for just a second John thought he might lose his cool a little bit.

“We should get ourselves around,” he decided. Felicity took the hint and stood.

“I have to get to work.”

“Whoa. Nobody said anything about leaving, Felicity.”

“Dig—“

“Not with this guy still out there.”

She looked mad again. “How could he possibly be looking for me? How could he know I used to do that? In another city, no less?” She was talking with her hands. And her loud voice. 

“Felicity—“

“There’s something else, isn’t there? Some other secret you and Oliver are trying to protect me from.” Still loud.

John sighed. Ready to turn Oliver’s girl back over to him. “This guy—“

“Give me a name, John.”

He huffed in exasperation and folded his arms.

She tipped her head. “Don’t make me hack the FBI.”

“That isn’t even a little bit funny, Felicity.”

She smirked.

Jesus God, this woman. He ran a hand up over his face and took in a giant lungful of air to release slowly before he spoke. “Adrian Chase. He has other names. Investigating the white collar stuff led me to find a simultaneous string of murders in every city he’s been in.”

He stopped. She waited.

“Oliver’s been doing some digging of his own. He told me Chase was in Hub City last year. The same time we were there.”

John watched the gears turn in her beautiful brain and wished with all his heart he didn’t have to be the one to tell her. 

“Okay,” she said slowly. “That still doesn’t mean I’m a target. It could just be a coincidence. You said yourself there are lots of girls dancing under the name Angel.”

He nodded softly. 

“So you have a job to do, and I have a job to do, and you and Oliver are going to handle this.”

“Felicity...”

The palm of her hand came up in front of his chest like a barrier, and damn if he didn’t freeze in place.

“I don’t know much about this case yet, but my guess is he hasn’t killed any of his other victims in broad daylight on the 25th floor of a downtown high rise. Palmer Tech has excellent security. You can drive me there if you want, but after that I’ll be fine.”

“Oliver won’t like it.”

“Oliver will get over it.” She turned on her heel and stalked back to her bedroom.

——————————————-

Oliver woke with a start, sitting straight up after his outstretched arm failed to find Felicity next to him. And then he remembered where he was. It had taken him hours to get to sleep, but now he was up. The clock read 7:30, which meant he’d only gotten about three hours, but there was no going back to sleep.

He texted John as he padded to the bathroom, groggy and a little nauseous. The response came back immediately:

She’s in the shower. Says she’s going to work.

Bullshit, he texted back, then waited.

You tell her. I’ll sell tickets.

Oliver started the shower and scrubbed his hands up over his face to muffle a string of curse words.

Diggle sent him another text a half an hour later that they were leaving the house, presumably so Oliver could go home and change if he wanted to, but home was thirty minutes each way, so he drove straight to the precinct. On the way he phoned Palmer Technologies and had a nice friendly chat with their head of security. 

Captain Pike was waiting for him, looking comfortable on the edge of Oliver’s desk. He knew better than to fall for it.

“You look like hell, Queen.”

“Thanks.”

“Are those yesterday’s clothes?”

“It’s a long story. I’ll get a clean shirt in a minute.” Oliver wasn’t a religious man, but a cup of coffee materializing in his hand at that moment would’ve gone a long way towards making him a believer. Instead, Pike jerked his head in the direction of his office and then got up to lead the way.

“Close the door.”

Oliver had been planning to anyway.

“What. The. Hell is going on in my city, Queen?”

Oliver sat on the edge of the chair across from the desk and made himself look into his captain’s eyes.

“Agent Diggle has been investigating an Adrian Chase—under a lot of aliases—for a string of white collar crimes all across the country. Those crimes coincide with hack job murders of exotic dancers, and John thinks they’re related.”

“A serial killer.”

Oliver nodded once.

“And the evidence?”

“Circumstantial, at this point. But he tracked him here and a girl got butchered in a club day before yesterday.”

“The one they found all over the alley? I saw the photos. Jesus.”

Pike’s attention was drawn to the window behind Oliver; he gestured to bring in his assistant carrying two cups of coffee, one of which Oliver accepted gratefully. It had sugar. He drank it anyway.

“So why round up all those girls last night?”

“The way he left the body parts, it looked like a message. Dinah thought of sketching them out to make them look more like letters, and Fe—uh, we figured out he’s using the Greek alphabet to spell out the name of his next victim. We grabbed all the strippers named Angel we could find—“ not quite all of them, but he wasn’t going to say that—“just in case.”

Pike whistled one long note. “That’s a helluva lot of premeditation.” Oliver nodded agreement as he took another sugary sip. “How’s Drake working out?”

“Good. She knows her stuff.”

Any further comments on the new detective were interrupted by a knock on the glass door. 

“Captain, just got a call. Another butcher job, downtown this time.”

Pike and Oliver exchanged a look and Oliver rose out of his seat, his stomach sinking.

“That lead FBI agent just showed up too,” she added before walking away. 

A frown crossed Oliver’s face.

Pike saw it, and watched him closely, but didn’t comment. “You and Drake cover this one. You’ve seen it before. Keep an eye on the Fed.”

“Yeah.”

John was consulting with two of his own agents, but looked up at Oliver’s rapid approach. He dismissed them and faced his friend, ready for an ear full.

“Felicity—“

“She’s at work, Oliver. Safe on her floor, and under orders not to leave the secured parts of the building. I spoke to the Head of Security. He’s got a guy on her floor. She’s good.”

Oliver huffed an unhappy sigh, but didn’t push it further. The look John was giving him said he’d already heard enough about it from Felicity. He turned back to his desk across the room and his friend followed. The bottom drawer held a neatly folded dress shirt; Oliver dropped it on his desk and began unbuttoning the one he was wearing.

“You always this prepared?” Dig sounded impressed.

“Few years ago I helped deliver a baby on the interstate during morning rush hour. I learned my lesson. Always carry a spare.”

John chuckled, but Oliver gave him a meaningful look as he buttoned. 

“Just got a call. Another one happened last night.”

“Shit. I thought we had them all secure.”

“We did. Unless someone held out on us. Wanna catch a ride over?”

John looked like he’d just swallowed glass. “Yeah, sure.”

Oliver glanced past his friend’s shoulder and nodded as Dinah power walked her way to them.

“I just heard. Shit.”

Oliver covered the introductions between John and Dinah perfunctorily as he tucked in the shirt, and then they were moving, though he took ten seconds to make another cup of coffee for the road.

“We must’ve missed one,” she was still muttering as they exited the car. They had a bit of ground to cover to get to the scene, because of all the fire trucks. Oliver and John shared a puzzled look. 

The Fire Chief met them at the tape and let them through. “It’s a hell of a thing.” 

They followed him down the alley to a small parking area bordered on all sides by buildings. The employee lot, probably, and the spot where the dumpster sat. “We weren’t sure how to put it out without disturbing the scene.”

Oliver was opening his mouth to ask for clarification as they rounded the knot of firemen and saw what he meant: the body parts were still on fire. 

A CSI danced around the perimeter taking photos as fast as humanly possible. Oliver shared a look with the Chief.

“Can you put ‘em out without using water?”

The Chief nodded and spoke quickly to the closest fireman, and moments later he was back with a heavy blanket from the truck. He and a partner carefully put out the fires as gently as they could, though at this point the smaller pieces were little more than ashes. 

The smell was incredible.

When they were no longer burning, the two detectives and the federal agent circled the area in silence.

“What do you think?” Oliver asked the question quietly as he stood over the shoulder of the crouching CSI. Beside him, Dinah’s phone appeared and she pulled up the screenshots of the pencil drawings.

“It’s a little hard to tell, in their current condition, but these look a lot like the last ones.”

“Do we have an ID?” John asked.

The CSI paused to address him. “Found a purse in the alley. It’ll have to be verified, but it appears this used to be Sophia Montenegro. Her stage name was Princess.”

“Not Angel?” Dinah sounded skeptical. He shook his head and got back to work taking samples. John leaned closer to Dinah’s phone and studied the photo against the gruesome tableau before them.

“You really think it still says Angel?”

“Yeah. It does.” Oliver’s voice was coming from behind him all of a sudden, making John turn as he opened his mouth to ask how he could be so sure, but the words froze in his throat.

Oliver was staring at the wall of the strip club and the word “ANGEL” scrawled on it, ten feet up.

It appeared to be written in blood.


	6. Chapter 6

Felicity managed to be at work 33 minutes before she started researching the name Adrian Chase, which, for her, was practically a record. She avoided serious hacking, deciding she’d save the deep dive until she was home.

But what she uncovered in a preliminary search was disturbing enough.

The morning dragged, and she found herself missing Oliver terribly. She logged in to their home security cameras to see if he’d come back to change, but besides a delivery person dropping a box at their door at 9:23am, there was no other activity. 

Her fingers hovered over her phone, itchy to send him a text, but at the last second she turned back to her work.

——————————————-

The crime scene swarmed with FBI agents. John had his hands full directing his team, so it took him a long time to realize Oliver was no longer around. After an initial scan of the area produced no results, he started looking for Dinah; she was standing off to the side with the Fire Chief, her hands in her pockets.

John crossed the space to them in a hurry.

“Where’s Oliver?”

She shrugged, looking confused. “He said he had to go. I assumed he checked with you first.”

John swore under his breath.

—————————————-

Oliver parked illegally in front of the building and flashed a badge at the security guard who met him on the sidewalk.

“You tow that and I’ll arrest you for hindering a police investigation,” he growled.

He stormed Palmer Technologies, a one man army with a badge and a thunderous look, commandeering an elevator after ordering the lobby security desk to begin ID-ing every person that walked through the door. 

The head of security was ringing his phone before he even made it to the 25th floor.

He ignored it.

Coming off the elevator he turned a full circle, getting his bearings and dead reckoning his way to the IT department. She was in the second bullpen; her desk was closest to the door. 

Felicity looked up as he came in, gun on his hip, and blinked twice. Reconciling the image of her boyfriend in work mode but standing in HER work.

“Oliver, what—“

“Get your things. We have to go.”

“But—“

“NOW, Felicity.”

Her spine stiffened. “No. Not until you tell me why.”

He huffed in frustration; his eyes never stopped roaming the room. “I need you to be safe.”

“Safe from what?”

Oliver’s gaze stopped on her and stayed. “You know what.”

“Adrian Chase?” His expression changed to shock and she smirked, but not in a friendly way. “John told me. What’s happened?”

A crowd had gathered near them, some of them friends of hers, others merely drama enthusiasts. She’d be the talk of the building by the end of the day.

“Not here.” His voice was tight, strained, but when he reached for her she pulled her arm away and stepped back. 

“I’m not leaving. I have work to do. The building has security. I’ll be fine.”

“Felicity...” 

“I said no.”

Two security guards were suddenly filling the doorway at Oliver’s back; his eyes flicked to them once but after that he ignored them.

“Miss?” one of them began. She opened her mouth to reply as Oliver’s head tipped to the side in a warning. To her. Her teeth clicked together and she glared, furious.

“Get out.”

His eyes...she sucked in a breath despite her anger, because absolute devastation was reflected back at her. He truly didn’t understand why she wasn’t following his lead. 

“Felicity, please.”

She saw it, laid out in front of her, the starkness of his fear that something would happen to her. He let her see it, let her see his vulnerability, and she knew his one true weakness was her.

“I said get out.”

It was a whisper, but he heard. 

—————————————

John was dead tired by the end of the day, but she made him stay up anyway, to walk her through the case. He drew a line at letting her see the photos, but he gave her copies of the pencil drawings Dinah had made, and he described the latest crime scene. The fire, and the blood. 

She wanted to text Oliver, but didn’t know what to say.

She made an online purchase and paid extra for next day delivery, then brought out a second blanket for the couch and hugged her house guest goodnight.

John’s voice stopped her as she was walking out of the room.

“You’re killing him. You know that, right?”

Felicity turned back and looked at him. 

“I’m not saying this because I think it’s your fault,” he continued. He squared up to her and crossed his arms, looking inexpressibly weary. “He’s screwed this up royally, and I imagine he knows that. But keeping him away from you isn’t going to help. Quite the opposite, in fact.”

“Dig—“

“Don’t shut him out, Felicity. It’s the one thing he can’t take. And I need him. I need his expertise, and his standing in the department, and his street smarts. But he won’t be any good to me if he’s busy being worried he’s lost you.”

Felicity let him see the anger—and the tears—in her eyes before she turned away to go to bed. She crawled under her covers and held herself rigid and still for several minutes until the feeling passed, then sat up to snag her laptop and arrange it the way she liked.

It was kind of comical, actually, how John thought a stern look would dissuade her from getting the rest of the evidence on Chase after he’d gone to sleep. If she wanted to see crime scene photos her boys wouldn’t show her, she’d damn well see crime scene photos. The FBI wasn’t hack-proof. Not for her.

She focused down and made her way inside in under ten minutes. She couldn’t help thinking legitimate work had made her rusty; she almost smiled. Most everything she saw was pretty dry; it was a white collar investigation, first and foremost. The scanned PDFs of the body parts as pencil drawings were there, some with notes scribbled around the edges in Oliver’s handwriting. It made her pulse pick up with longing.

The photos were in a separate file, thumbnails neatly lined up in columns. There had to be hundreds of them. Felicity’s eyes flicked to her bedroom door, half expecting to see Dig standing there with his giant arms crossed and a murderous frown. She took a deep breath and opened the first file.

She made a little noise at the back of her throat, a sound that turned into a low moan as she continued to click through the photos one by one. The sheer tediousness of all the angles of each bit of flesh and bone that, at some point, had been a woman who’d found herself making a living by displaying herself to men willing to pay for the opportunity to look, was mind-numbing. The last set, the ones with a time stamp from earlier in the day, were various stages of blackened lumps, some of them—the early ones—still burning. She clapped a hand over her mouth, seriously thinking she might be sick. 

Felicity’s feet kicked out to push the laptop away as she scrambled back against the headboard. They’d been right—of course they had—to want to shield her from something she wasn’t trained to compartmentalize. This man, this MONSTER, Adrian Chase, he was so much more than she’d expected to find when she decided to defy John’s orders. The realization, as she quested after her computer and backed out of the FBI database with shaking fingers, made her sick to her stomach. Oliver—and John—were dealing with this every hour of every day, desperately trying to out think him so they could catch him before he took another human life. And she’d only been hindering that by pulling Oliver’s focus because she was scared she couldn’t live without him unless she forced herself to try. Shame robbed her of tears, though they burned white hot in the middle of her chest, demanding release. 

She sat up late into the night, afraid to close her eyes and let herself dream.

————————————

Oliver dragged himself to the local Target for a package of socks and underwear, then buried himself under the covers for his second night in the hotel room. He drifted off immediately, but seemed to be aware of his surroundings all night, never able to go all the way under into a deep sleep.

His eyes were gritty and his brain buzzed with fatigue when he finally hauled himself out of bed for another day. His chest felt hollowed out where his heart should be. The prospect of more work on the case just made him tired.

Dinah was waiting with coffee when he arrived at the precinct; they were the last two people in the briefing room before Pike began the morning meeting. 

“Anything new?” he muttered as they stood side by side at the back of the room. She took a sip before answering.

“They rushed the DNA testing; the vic is definitely Montenegro.”

“So definitely not an Angel.”

She shook her head no.

A couple of heads turned their way to let them know they were being disruptive; they left anything else they needed to say until later. 

—————————————

A different FBI agent met her at the edge of the sidewalk as she got out of John’s car in front of Palmer Tech. This was a woman, and it was probably her imagination that painted a disapproving look on her face as they shook hands and the woman nodded to Dig that she was all set, but Felicity had to fight not to drop her head in shame as they walked into the building. 

She only received one text all day, a single line from John that appeared after lunch. A lunch she could barely choke down with a straight-faced stranger posted at the corner of her desk and the awkward stares of co-workers following her every time she had to leave her space. 

Ask him to come home, the text said. 

She left it another hour—out of defiance or fear, she couldn’t say—but in the end her trembling fingers sent the message to Oliver. She bit her lip and waited for an answer; it wasn’t long, but it still felt like forever.

You sure?

Yes.

Okay.

Her concentration was shot to hell after that, and she finally gave up and requested an early ride home. She could almost hear the sigh of resignation in John’s texted reply.

————————————————

True to Chase’s pattern, there were no homicide calls to any strip clubs; a day off, as it were. Oliver spent it catching up on other work and strategizing with Diggle and Dinah. No one mentioned Felicity beyond Dig letting him know she’d been delivered safely to Palmer Tech with a discreet FBI agent in tow. John would be picking her up personally at the end of the day.

“Come home tonight, man. She’s coming around, and you need a good night’s rest.”

John’s giant hand came down on his shoulder and Oliver saw Dinah give him a sympathetic look too. A lump trapped the words in his throat, so he only nodded. 

Felicity sent a text to him herself, after lunch, but at first he couldn’t trust it. He found himself checking his phone every few minutes throughout the rest of the afternoon, just to be sure the invitation to come home was real. 

He stopped for Chinese food on the way, not from Felicity’s favorite restaurant for geographic reasons, but a peace offering nonetheless. He attempted a deep, cleansing breath outside the door, but stress and fatigue just made him want to throw up, so he held it instead as he let himself in.

The main floor was empty; the tinny sound of faraway music led him to the door to the basement. He stopped with his hand on the knob and took that deep breath, finally, then descended the stairs.

The first thing he saw was his weight bench, shoved against the wall in what must’ve been an exercise in brute strength. The rest of their equipment had been moved out against the walls to make room for a shiny silver stripper pole that was bolted to the ceiling with a metal plate. 

Felicity was swinging around it. 

He opened his mouth to ask how it got there, but his eyes fell on John first; the wrench in his hand told the rest of the story. The music was loud enough to make it uncomfortable to talk normally, so he just stood, food in hand, and waited for her slow rotation to bring her around to face him.

Their eyes caught and she dropped a bare foot to the concrete floor to stop her spin. Her mouth opened and closed once and his eyes flicked down long enough to watch. Oliver decided to speak first.

“Ready to eat?”

The three of them walked upstairs in silence, and Oliver set the food on the table before disappearing to rinse off in the shower and put on clean clothes. They ate in silence, too. 

“The pole,” he said quietly, setting his box of beef lo mein on the table and sliding it away. Across from him, Dig swiped a napkin across his mouth and sat forward. Felicity finished chewing, but didn’t meet his eyes.

“It’s the best way to find him,” she said finally, shrugging her shoulders like it was a foregone conclusion and he was the only one who hadn’t caught on. 

“No.”

She looked at him then. “Oliver, how many more women have to be murdered before we give him what he wants? It’s not like I’ll ever be alone—“

“No, goddammit!”

“Oliver, she’s right. We’ll fill the place with agents, he’ll never get so much as a finger on her.”

“We’re not making my girlfriend bait for a serial killer.” It came out low, and growly, and under different circumstances it would’ve made Felicity pause, but she had a growly papa bear sitting on her other side too, and she’d already convinced him. She sat up straight in her chair and put both feet on the floor so she could lean forward and drop a hand onto his.

“Oliver...”

He sucked in a breath at the contact, physically affected by her touch after days without it, and she knew she had him. 

“Please let me do this.”

His eyes, lifting to hers, were wrecked. 

“Talk her out of this, Dig,” he said without looking away from her, his voice barely above a whisper. John’s shoulders jumped as he huffed a not-funny laugh. 

“I’ve tried. I give up.”

They spent thirty minutes strategizing before making the necessary phone calls to set certain wheels in motion, and then, though it was barely eight o’clock, Oliver announced he was going to bed. Felicity trailed behind him, leaving John to make his way back to his hotel room, and probably rethink all of his life choices.

She washed her face and slipped into her pjs before hovering in the doorway, watching him where he already lay on his side with the covers pulled up to his ears. He looked completely exhausted.

“Oliver—“

“Come to bed, Felicity,” he mumbled. That was all.

She hesitated another second, then crossed to her side of the bed and slipped under the covers. Oliver rolled to his back as she got in but waited, letting her creep against him before he wrapped her up in his arms and held on tight. 

“I’ll be alright,” she promised him in a whisper, but he was already asleep.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oh darling readers, Stuck at Home for Three Weeks During a Pandemic is THE WORST excuse not have updated EVER, but I’m here now, and hopefully the wait was worth it. [NOTE: NSFW to follow.]
> 
> For the first time ever I am assigning homework before you read. To get the mood (and the song) for the latter half of this chapter, hit up YouTube with the link below, or Google “SYTYCD Mark and Comfort Hater”. You won’t be sorry. Love you all! Stay safe! Enjoy. ❤️  
> https://youtu.be/eNCLu2CjPeA

They slept late, since the alarm had been purposefully forgotten by the person who was always in charge of setting it. Felicity woke around the right time anyway, lurching away from him in surprise when she saw the light through the curtains, but Oliver snagged her back and held her close, waiting her out until she began to drift off again.

“We’ll be up late tonight,” he reminded her in a whisper gone rusty with sleep. She sighed and melted against him.

Dinah rang his phone at 8:30, and they could no longer pretend they were still sleeping. Felicity padded to the shower while he took the call.

“I had a thought,” Dinah said without preamble.

“Go.”

“It’s about the security company. At our first crime scene.”

Oliver closed one eye and squinted, clearing the cobwebs in his brain and trying not to imagine the current view he’d be getting if he was in the shower.

“John there with you?”

“Yeah. He just walked in.”

“Bring him and come here. He knows the way.”

She hesitated a second “‘Kay.”

“I will pay you a million dollars to bring us some breakfast.”

Dinah huffed a laugh at that. “You got it.”

They hung up and Oliver dropped his phone onto his chest to run both hands over his head. His partner and his girlfriend were going to meet eventually; it might as well be on Felicity’s home turf.

“I have a project due.” It was the first thing she said, coming out of the shower in a towel. 

“You’ve been cleared to work from home, you know that.”

She dropped the towel while she fished through the closet. It was not an invitation by any means, but he rolled onto his side to watch anyway. 

“John’s on his way. With breakfast.” 

Felicity threw a look at him over her shoulder. She could always tell when there was more.

“He’s bringing Dinah.”

She kept moving, stepping gracefully into a pair of yoga pants, and if he didn’t know her very, very well, he’d think she hadn’t heard. 

“So.” The single word was a conversation all on its own. Oliver pulled his lips in and looked away as he got out of bed.

Felicity had the coffee ready by the time he got out of the shower, and two more people were in his living room when he finished dressing. 

Dig and Dinah were both sitting forward on the couch, side by side. A bag of donuts sat on the coffee table accompanied by two steaming, cardboard-wrapped cups; two more waited in the drink carrier.

Felicity was hovering in the kitchen.

Oliver suppressed a sigh and stepped into the arena. “Thanks for coming.” He held a hand out for the small blonde hiding out in his peripheral vision and waited for her to step up next to him and settle her back against his palm. Dinah looked up in anticipation; Dig held very still.

“This is my new partner, Dinah Drake. Dinah, my girlfriend, Felicity Smoak.”

Felicity hesitated a microsecond before stepping forward and holding her hand out across Diggle for the other woman. Dinah accepted and they shook.

“Nice to meet you.”

“Likewise.” Dinah’s voice was husky and soft. “I’ve heard a lot of great things about you.”

John and Oliver shared the briefest glance.

“What was your thought about the security company?” Oliver picked the closest armchair and sat, his hand still on the small of Felicity’s back. She took the gesture for what it was, an invitation, and settled her bottom on the arm of the chair. A member of the team.

Dinah pushed her hair behind her ear. “The first club manager said he was getting an equipment upgrade, which is why there were no cameras working the night of the murder. The latest one, in the Glades, had the cameras in the parking lot disabled as well. What if they’re linked?”

Felicity sat up straighter, intrigued. “Sounds like it just needs a little research.” She glanced at Oliver for his thoughts and he nodded once. Her mouth quirked into a tiny smile at him and then she was up and gone, after her laptop and some answers. 

Dig picked up his coffee but didn’t drink. “Did we find a club?”

Dinah nodded. “We did. The manager owed narcotics a favor. It’s outside of downtown, harder to keep under surveillance, maybe, but there’s less around. Not many places to hide for him either.”

“We need to advertise.”

“They’ve already added it to their sign out front. Putting it on their website this morning. It could probably use a photo of her.”

Oliver restrained himself from running a hand up over his face. All this was crazy. He should be putting a ring on her finger and planning a wedding, not dangling her in front of a serial killer. 

“Guys, I don’t know—“

“I have a photo you can use.” Felicity was standing in the doorway to the living room with her tablet in the crook of her arm. “I can email it to you.”

Oliver twisted in his chair to look at her. “You sure you want to do this?”

She shrugged, her gaze bouncing from him to John. “He wants me.”

“Yeah, but we could bait and switch. Advertise you but give them, I don’t know, an undercover cop. Somebody with training.”

Oliver’s eye roamed to Dinah in illustration, but she didn’t look very keen. 

“You don’t want me. I played basketball and field hockey. Nobody would believe for a second I was a dancer.”

“Oliver,” John said gently, “It has to be Felicity. She can do it.”

“I can.” God, she sounded so determined. So confident. Oliver looked back at her again and she gave him a smile so soft it broke his heart. 

When this is over, he vowed to himself, leaving the actual promise open-ended. Because he wanted to give her everything.

—————————————

They worked through lunch, then John and Dinah left to finish their assignments at the precinct. Oliver ran a hand up over his face; he could hear the bass from Felicity’s music thumping from the basement.

She was working on her routine. He stopped on the stairs and crossed his arms to admire her grace and power. It didn’t look like she’d lost a step in the past year. Their eyes caught as she spun, so he moved down the last few steps to wait at the bottom for the song to finish. It felt so much like her apartment in Hub City his breath caught in his chest. 

“Looks good,” he said as she crossed the room to shut off the music. 

“I’m a little rusty.”

“I couldn’t tell.”

Felicity smirked, just a lift of one corner of her mouth. “Flatterer.”

Oliver held out his hand and she stepped over the barbells by his feet to accept it.

“It’s gonna be a late night. Come take a nap with me.”

She sighed. “I should do some work. Some actual work. Work work. You know, the stuff I get paid for.”

“You’re gonna get paid for this. $250 a night plus two percent of the take at the door. I negotiated it myself.”

“Huh. Well. Guess I didn’t need that post-secondary education after all.”

He chuckled and tugged on her arm, and though she groaned, she also followed.

She stayed on her side of the bed at first, turned away from him with a ratty paperback in one hand and her other hand under her cheek, but by the time he woke an hour later she had squirmed closer in sleep, her backside tantalizingly close. Oliver stroked her hip once and then left his hand on her. 

Felicity sighed and rolled onto her stomach, still mostly asleep; he tried not to take it as a rejection. He got up and showered again, something to pass the time, then went back to the living room to check in with the precinct. Dig was out at the club, scoping vantage points and exits, Dinah said. 

“You ready?” she asked quietly. Oliver sighed into the phone.

“She is. I don’t think I’ll ever be.”

“You won’t let anything happen to her.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

He made them a nice dinner, something light but made from scratch. Afterward he sent her away and cleaned up on his own, letting the monotony of scrubbing pots and pans empty his brain for a few minutes. 

At eight o’clock she was back in the living room with a bag over her shoulder, ready to go.

“Let me change. It’ll just take a second,” he promised. 

It took more than the promised second, mostly because he paused to open the top dresser drawer and fish the ring box from the back of it. Oliver raised the lid to confirm it was still there, catching the light and glittering in invitation. Felicity’s voice floated through the bedroom door.

“Oliver, we need to go!”

He snapped the box closed and put it back.

———————————————

The strip club had a parking lot that reminded them both of Vertigogo’s. The four lane road it sat on was sparsely populated with small businesses, light industry, and the occasional gas station. The club itself was called Purgatory.

“Where Better to Find an Angel?” the sign out front read. Felicity saw it and made a sound in the back of her throat like she wanted to laugh but didn’t find it funny enough. 

“Who are you supposed to be?” she asked as they got out of the car. She meant the ratty tee shirt, denim jacket, and backwards baseball cap he’d changed into at home. 

Oliver paused with a super serious expression. “Your pimp.”

She gave him a look that was half shrug and half rolled eyes as she hefted the bag onto her shoulder. The parking lot was full; Oliver kept a protective hand on her upper arm as they wove their way to the employee entrance.

“Let me do the talking,” he warned her quietly, when they were steps away from the door. Felicity shot him a non-plussed look but kept still. 

Dig had smoothed the way for them earlier in the day; the two of them were ushered straight in to the back of the house. He was here somewhere, Dig, staked out in an office watching the security feed and making the manager all kinds of nervous, probably. 

Oliver stopped her at the door to the dressing room and stared down at her for almost a full minute. 

“I gotta go,” Felicity whispered finally, though she made no move to pull away.

“I’ll be out front,” he murmured, memorizing everything about her as if he’d never see her again.

“I know.”

She pulled her arm out of his grip as gently as possible and pushed through the door without a look back.

Oliver recognized one of the bouncers as a guy from the force; they didn’t so much as nod to each other as he slipped out the back door and walked around the building to come in the front like any other paying customer.

The interior was dark and loud, not the best strip club he’d ever been in, but far from the worst. He paid his cover and found a seat near the back, a spot with a good view of the stage and all the exits. There would be a handful of cops and FBI here too; the bartender was one of John’s. He’d been told one of the dancers was also an agent, though he had no idea which one.

A bottle of beer thunked down on the table in front of him and his stomach twisted, but when he tried to hand it back a very familiar face was looking back at him and shaking her head.

“It’s water,” Dinah murmured, waving him off. She was dressed, but only barely. Clearly she had the skills needed to serve drinks, if not dance. Oliver didn’t let himself stare.

Thirty minutes passed as he sipped his faux beer and scanned the room for somebody out of the ordinary, but nobody was acting weird or wearing a tee shirt with “Kiss Me, I’m a Serial Killer” emblazoned on it. Felicity would think that was hilarious, Oliver thought, feeling like smiling for the first time in days.

He thought he had all the planted agents and cops picked out by the time the announcer introduced their headline act. He glanced at his watch, checked the room again, and tried to keep his heart from beating out of his chest. 

He recognized the song from their basement; it was a band he didn’t recognize when Felicity had mentioned it, but he remembered the song was called “Tokyo Drifting”. She came out on stage to cheers and whistles, making Oliver want to pick a few fights, but he kept his seat and watched her slink up to the pole and start her routine.

The girl calling herself Angel was wearing an outfit familiar to him, the black satin boy shorts and bustier from the night they met. Despite the severity of the situation he found himself reacting to her immediately. He shifted forward as Felicity launched herself at the pole and swung in a slow, tantalizing arc. The crowd went wild. 

Oliver knew he should be focused on the crowd, looking for Chase, watching the exits.  
But the sight of his girl, blonde hair flying out behind her as she spun to the floor and oozed sexuality for the crowd, threw him back to a year ago in Hub City, where a shy but feisty stripper came into his life and then returned him to life. As much as she was turning him on—and she was definitely turning him on—Felicity as Angel was reminding him of the dark place he’d been in and the way her love and trust had brought him into the light. 

He blinked slowly as her song came to an end to thunderous approval by the audience. He’d been so deep in thought he’d hardly registered the fact she was topless by the end of her routine. Oliver shifted in his seat and cleared his throat, only then remembering to scan the room again for suspicious characters.

He didn’t expect to see her before her next number, but five minutes into the follow-up act Felicity slipped out a side door and strolled toward his table. She’d added a pair of stilettos to the black outfit. He picked the not-beer up and considered it nonchalantly, then set it back down untasted. He made his mouth form a confident smirk, though part of him wondered what the hell she thought she was doing.

“I saw you watching,” she said, saucy, and loud enough for the immediate tables to hear. “You want a dance?”

Oliver blinked once but otherwise kept her gaze, trying to understand what she wanted. When he didn’t answer, she held out her hand in invitation; he stared at it for a breath but then took it inside his own, letting her tug him to a stand and lead the way past the floor bouncer into a private room.

“Hey,” he murmured, coming to a stop just outside the door and halting her forward progress. Felicity shot him a look over her shoulder and pulled against him, making him move again. The room had a single straight back chair in the center and purple up lighting in each corner. Strings of purple Christmas lights were draped from the ceiling; it looked like a college kid on pot had decorated it. 

“Take your jacket off.”

Oliver blinked once and complied, dropping it to the floor with only a glance away from her.

She pulled him around so his back was to the chair, and just as he opened his mouth to ask her what the hell she was up to Felicity planted both hands on his chest and shoved him, hard. He stumbled back two steps and sat. 

“Felicity—“

She jerked her chin at him. “Do it.”

Oliver’s mouth opened and closed and his eyes flicked to the ceiling. “Cameras—“

“Don’t worry about it.” She turned away to cue her music, discussion clearly over. He sighed and pushed his hands palms down under his thighs. 

The music came on and she turned to face him, her expression hard. Mad. Oliver swallowed thickly. Without looking away from him she unhooked her top and shimmied out of the boy shorts, leaving only the heels. His eyes roamed against his will, taking in the curve of her breasts, the toned lines that defined her core, her shapely thighs, and the bunched muscles of her calves. He swallowed again, immediately uncomfortable in the restrictive denim of his jeans.

Felicity stalked forward and threw a leg over his lap, settling in and grinding her center against the fly of his jeans so roughly it pulled an involuntary groan from him.

“Close your eyes,” she ordered. Definitely pissed. He obeyed and almost immediately felt her mouth on his in a rough, sloppy kiss. He tipped his head to get a better angle but she pulled away, denying him. He waited, mouth open for her to return, already aching with want for her.

With his eyes closed Oliver found he could just let go and feel everything as it was happening. The music pulsed through him, the synth sounds reminding him of strobe lighting somehow. She’d turned it up loud; every time the bass thumped he felt it in his chest. 

Her mouth was back on him, her tongue exploring as it pleased. He followed as well as he could, but mostly let her do what she wanted, leaving her to be the boss and set the pace. She had an almost painful grip on his biceps, squeezing and kneading his muscles and pulling his focus from what she was doing to his mouth. It made him want to free his hands and reciprocate on her breasts.

She tipped his chin up not quite gently, dropping his head back and attacking his throat with nips and kisses as she ground against his crotch to the beat of the music. It took him a second to realize she was pulling at the neck of his tee, but he didn’t figure out her intention until she gripped it between her fists and pulled, hard. With three good tugs the tee ripped down the front. Oliver gasped.

Her mouth was on his chest then, roaming over his pecs, teasing his nipples until he hissed and thrust up at her with his hips. Felicity sighed and pushed back just as hard, making him see stars. She scooted back off his lap and shoved his knees apart so she could kneel on the floor between them. Meanwhile, her tongue returned to his chest and worked its way to his abs; he flexed without really thinking about it, giving her a path to follow.

“Fuck,” he growled into the air, so hard in the jeans he thought they might cause serious damage. 

Felicity made a noise somewhere between and growl and a chuckle as she let her fingers walk along the waistband of the jeans, brushing and tickling his skin as she continued to lick her way downward. Her nimble fingers undid the button and she scratched her nails over the zipper, pushing hard enough on the upstroke to press against his erection. He moaned a swear word and almost released his hands from their prison.

“Don’t,” she said, sharp. Clearly an order. He relaxed his arms slightly.

On the next pass down she opened his fly, not caring that it rubbed his dick painfully, making him hiss. It didn’t matter, because immediately after he felt the heat of her breath at the head; she lipped the fabric of his boxers, tracing the shape of him through the cloth. Her teeth grazed him next, the softest pressure but teeth nonetheless. Oliver made a sound that was a whimper and a prayer all at once as he anticipated what he hoped was coming next. But instead of more contact he felt her shift away; he dared to break the rules and cracked one eyelid open to check on her.

“Off.”

He stared at her as the music ended and started over, looped. Endless. Two could play at this game, he knew that very well, but her look of anger also held a touch of lust. For him. There was no way he was going to fuck this up by trying to get the upper hand.

Oliver stood and dropped his pants and boxers in one go.

He hesitated, because she was now eye level with her prize and he’d be damned if he’d miss the opportunity to watch her bob on his dick from this angle. She looked up at him, clearly considering, but shook her head the tiniest bit and indicated with her eyes that he should sit again. Sitting worked just as well, Oliver decided. He returned to the chair.

She took him in all at once, a long slide of her lips and tongue until he rested against the back of her throat. He almost lost it right there, but she was off just as quickly, leaving him wet and vulnerable to the air. Oliver groaned deep in his chest.

“More?” she whispered, watching him very carefully.

There were no words. “Mmm,” he gave her instead. 

She gripped him at the base and slid her hand upwards with a twist at the end, then dropped back down and let her mouth follow, swallowing him again. His hands, which he’d left free after sitting down, found their way into her hair the way he knew she liked. His fingers wound around her curls and held tight, just this side of pain. She moaned her approval, and the vibration against his dick made him see stars.

“Felicity, I can’t... I won’t...oh god...”

And then he was cupping the sides of her head to still her, pushing her away as gently as possible because he needed her to stop NOW, before he ruined the whole thing. She blinked at him once, twice, and then shifted forward to crawl up his frame until they were eye to eye. She stepped out to either side of his legs, ready to sit again, this time with no clothing between them.

“Are you...?” His fingers skated across her hips, willing to help get her ready if necessary, but she dipped down to run her center along the top of his right thigh and he knew she was more than wet enough. Her arms came around his shoulders and she stepped forward and lined their bodies up without looking. 

She sank onto him all in one go. Oliver almost swallowed his tongue.

Felicity held still for a moment, eye to eye with him, watching him closely though her eyes were slitted with pleasure. He waited too, letting her see the desire on his face and his need to move now that he was inside her. It still felt like home, every goddamn time; somehow in all of this madness he’d forgotten that. 

“Felicity—“

“Shh.”

She gripped the back of his neck, nails out, and began to move, writhing to the song that seemed to have started over again without him noticing. Oliver closed his eyes and let her move.

I’m a sinner, never said anything else...

The bite of her nails brought him back to consciousness and pushed him closer to the edge simultaneously, and he groaned at the juxtaposition. His hands slid up her thighs and along her sides until he reached her breasts, flicking and pinching her nipples with his fingers until she squirmed and gasped with pleasure.

I didn’t lie to you, thinking of somebody else...

He wanted up, suddenly, wanted to be standing so he could get some leverage and take control of the pace and her pleasure. He somehow managed to toe off his shoes and work his pants the rest of the way off his legs without disturbing the way Felicity was moving against him to the music. 

Hater...

She made a noise of surprise when he dropped his hands under her ass and rose to his feet in one go. It was only a couple steps to the nearest wall; her back stopped against it and they both moaned as he seated himself deeper inside her. 

I’m a hater, hating nobody but you...

With his feet planted wide, Oliver could finally thrust as hard and as fast as he liked. 

“Is this what you wanted?” he hissed against her ear, setting a pace he knew he wouldn’t keep for long. Felicity’s head was tipped back against the wall, her mouth open in a soundless cry, but at his question she dropped it to look him in the eye.

See you later, I’d hate to see you soon...

“Oliver...don’t...ever...keep a secret...from me...again.”

It came out in pants to the rhythm of his thrusts; the gasp at the end nearly undid him. 

“God, Felicity—“

“Promise me.”

“I promise. I promise I promise I promise—“

She swallowed the rest of his vow with a searing kiss and then scrabbled frantically against his shoulders.

“Downdowndown,” she ordered, wriggling against him until he lowered her to the floor with a groan at the loss of her. Felicity stepped around him but tugged on his hand; he pivoted with her and watched her bend over and lay her palms flat against the seat of the chair with a glance over her shoulder. Normally their height difference would make this position impossible, but with the heels...

Oliver stepped forward and entered her in one long thrust that left them both gasping. Suddenly he was back in her pre-war apartment in Hub City, staring at the top of her head reflected in a fogging mirror and wanting to fuck her hard enough to drown out his demons. He hadn’t, that time, but there was nothing stopping him now. He tilted his hips for a better angle and found a new gear. 

He lost count of the times the song repeated, but not the number of times Felicity shuddered with pleasure as an orgasm raced through her body. Knowing he had the magic angle now he gritted his teeth and kept a rein on his own release until, from the sounds ripping from her throat, he knew her third was imminent. He said her name, told her he loved her, and as her walls constricted around him again he exploded with a cry, emptying himself inside her while she pushed back against him and reached behind to search for his hand. 

He thought his legs might give out; they felt weak and rubbery as he draped himself over her back and banded an arm around her waist to secure her against him and help her hold his weight. He left a few light kisses along the bumps of her spine as he listened to their panted breaths syncing. One of her heels wobbled under him and that was his cue to pull out of her and bear his own weight, but even knowing that wasn’t enough to keep him from moaning in protest at the loss. 

He heard Felicity huff a delighted laugh below him as he straightened, and the bound thing that had resided inside his chest for days finally released its hold on him. They were okay. He would protect her and everything would be okay. 

They retrieved their clothes in a mutual, sated silence and then she turned off her music and waited for him at the door. Oliver stepped into her space and pushed her back ever-so-gently against the door. His hands sought hers and their fingers tangled together. He dropped his forehead to hers and closed his eyes and just breathed with her for a moment.

“When this is over—“

“Don’t,” she breathed. “Don’t promise me anything. You know what happened the last time.”

He remembered. The AV closet in Slade Wilson’s club flashed through his head; the promise he’d made there was interrupted by violence, and fear. And blood. 

“Okay,” he whispered, nodding softly against her. “I won’t.”

“I have to go get cleaned up. I’m on again in a few minutes.”

Oliver suddenly remembered what she was there to do, and why. “Sorry.” 

“No, it’s okay.” She pulled back to look him in the eye and smiled. “I wanted this. I needed to find you again.”

Her words made his breath catch in his throat. Oliver let go of her hands to cup her face and pull her close for a deep kiss that felt like it could go on forever. He made that his promise, poured everything he felt for her into it; the message left them both gasping when they finally moved apart.

“I’ll be right out front,” he reminded her as she turned away from him to open the door. Felicity paused to look back over her shoulder.

“I know.”

In the next moment she was gone from his sight, but the memory of the look of love and trust in her eyes kept him warm the rest of the night.


	8. Chapter 8

“We’re almost out of coffee.”

She said it as they passed in the hallway, him looking for something to eat while she headed for the shower. He snagged her waist long enough to hug her close. 

“Yeah.”

Felicity had been the headlining act at Purgatory for five days. Five long days that had stretched into five endless nights of pole routines, surveillance, and drunken, hooting crowds. 

Five days with no murders and no Adrian Chase. 

They didn’t talk about it at home, mostly because Oliver spent all damn day talking about it with John, and Dinah, and his frustrated captain. The FBI was all kinds of patient about these sorts of operations, but even John was getting the proverbial side eye from his superiors. They’d given Chase what he’d asked for, what he’d demanded with fire and blood, but he’d chosen to go quiet instead. 

The crew of undercover officers posted around the club not posing as employees were switched out nightly, wary as they were that he would notice if the same people were there every night. Oliver took his turn hiding out in the manager’s office to watch the security cameras, knowing his presence in the audience every night would be a red flag. But even that didn’t seem to do the trick. 

Oliver had been working from home as much as possible, but when he had to go into the precinct Felicity came too. She had her own corner carved out, space enough for her laptop and her paperwork. Her project for work was coming along, but he could tell the long nights were taking its toll. It worried him.

An hour later he waited by the front door for her, ready for one more night watching her display her body for the underbelly of Starling City in order to catch a killer. Maybe tonight it would end.

But he’d thought that before.

“You ready?” he called, scanning the townhouse for all the things that needed to be done. The table next to the front door was overflowing with packages and unopened bills, proof that both of them were currently falling down in the adulting department. 

“Yeah,” she yelled back, muffled by the closet. “Is there a hat out there?”

Oliver obligingly looked around. “A purple one?”

Felicity finally appeared with a bag over her shoulder. “That’s the one.” He picked the felt fedora up off the back of the couch and followed her out the door. 

“Part of your costume?” He put a little playfulness into his voice. Felicity threw a look at him over her shoulder.

“Most of my costume.”

He managed to keep the swear word under his breath.

—————————————

John was waiting for them in the manager’s office. He looked haggard; Oliver knew better than anyone how much was riding on this for his friend, how he agonized over the requests he had to make for more personnel and more funds. This operation was based off little more than a hunch, and so far it was not panning out like he’d hoped. 

Felicity made small talk for a minute, but when it became evident that everyone was tired and slightly on edge she disappeared to get dressed for her show. Oliver watched the door close behind her and chose to stay in the office, taking the corner of the manager’s desk for his perch and crossing his arms.

John’s eyes rested on the closed door for a long moment before sliding to him. “You gonna put a ring on that?”

Oliver laughed once, surprised. “I’m trying, John. I really am trying.”

John chuckled. “It sounds like I’m getting in the way.”

“A little, yeah.” They both smiled and John leaned back in his chair with a sigh.

“This can’t go on forever,” he said quietly. 

“We’ll get him, John. He’ll mess up, and we’ll get him.”

John nodded and ran his hands up over his head. “If I forget to say it later, thanks for doing this, man. I wouldn’t have made it this far without you.”

Oliver shook his head. “I’m here for you. You never have to ask.”

They stared at each other a moment before John laughed. “Okay, this is getting sappy and weird.”

“Agreed.”

John pointed to the security feed. “And there’s your girl now.” He whistled low. “That is some costume.”

Oliver twisted around to see what he meant and his mouth went dry. He stood in slow motion and edged toward the door. 

“I may...watch this one from backstage...”

Dig nodded slowly. “Good idea.”

He could hear the crowd as soon as he stepped into the hallway; the stage door wasn’t far, though he had to wade through a crowd of Purgatory dancers who were scrunched together offstage to watch. 

One of them ran a hand over his ass as he passed by, but he let it go.

The song, “Purple Hat”, matched her—for lack of a better term—costume. She was already on the pole, spinning in time with the music and balancing the hat on the end of one extended leg and pointed foot. 

“Prop work is tricky,” a stripper behind him observed. “She’s good.”

The audience thought so too. A guy crowded the stage and leaned forward to try to snag the hat, but a bouncer—not one of their plants—intervened. Oliver’s heart rate ticked up. He should get back to the office and the security cameras, but the pull to stay, mere feet from her, was stronger. He shifted to balance his weight evenly across the balls of his feet. The fingers of his left hand rubbed together, a reminder of his year old injury.

Her routine was reaching its climax, and so too was the crowd noise. They loved Angel, they wanted more, and Felicity gave it to them. The girls back stage were clapping now too, caught up in the complexity of the tricks and the sexiness Felicity exuded to every corner of the room. Oliver was panting with the adrenaline dump, wanting her, wanting more, wanting an end to this whole operation.

The hand on his shoulder made him jump a foot.

“Guy in the office wants you,” one of the girls said into his ear; the message had been passed from the back of the group. Oliver hated to leave, but he tore his eyes away from her blonde hair and her curves and pushed back through the women. There was quite a bit more groping of his person this time, he couldn’t help noticing.

The door to the office was open; John was on his phone. Oliver went straight to the desk as John mouthed “Dinah”, pulling desk duty this shift. John listened intently for another fifteen seconds, a finger held up to indicate the call was almost finished.

“Okay. We’ll be right there.” He stabbed the end call button and dropped the phone on the desk. “Woman just staggered into the precinct, covered in blood. Said a man grabbed her and dragged her into his apartment, intending to kill her. She was able to fight him off and get away.” John paused and watched Oliver closely. “She said his apartment walls were covered in photos of chopped up women.”

“You think it was Chase?”

“I think we better go see.”

Oliver’s head swiveled to the stage door. “What about—“

“There are twelve people here watching her, either FBI or the police. If we leave, there will still be ten. We gotta go.”

Oliver only hesitated a moment before following his friend.

The car ride was almost silent; Oliver watched the city buildings pass him by in a blur, thinking ahead to what they might find, and back to what he’d left in that club.

“Felicity...” he said once, re-thinking this whole plan.

“If he’s in his apartment, he can’t be in the club, can he.” Oliver shook his head without looking over. “We already have the building surrounded, they’re just waiting on us to show up and lead the charge. She’s safe, Oliver.”

The end of the street was blocked off by a black and white; they were waved through and John parked diagonally in the middle of the street, twenty yards from the front door to the building. Dinah was there to greet them, tossing Oliver an SCPD vest and an earpiece as John circled back to the trunk of his car for his own gear. 

“Which one?” Oliver asked, checking the chamber of his gun and glancing back for Dig’s whereabouts.

“Fourth floor, all the way at the back.”

“Could she give a description?”

“Claims she can identity him if she sees him again.”

Oliver shared a look with his partner and let her lead the way.

John veered off to confer with his people, then caught up with them just outside the entrance. “SCPD has the back, Feds have the front. Your captain is in the command bus.” He tipped his head to the right to indicate the vehicle parked next to the curb. “He’ll relay on your orders.”

Oliver’s eyebrows jumped in surprise and Dinah’s gaze flicked to him and back to Dig. 

“You ready?” Oliver asked. John nodded, quick and tight. “Following your lead.”

The power to the building was still on, but the stairs and halls were peppered with officers to keep the other tenants in their apartments and quiet. “The fourth floor only has him, according to the super,” Dinah murmured. That was good. Nobody wanted more civilian casualties at the end of this. 

For a couple minutes the sound of three sets of feet climbing the stairs was the only thing to disturb the quiet of the building. At each floor the three of them scanned left and right, nodding to the officers and agents stationed along the hall and waiting on their call. Oliver reminded himself to keep breathing, slow and steady.

They rounded the corner to the fourth floor to find six officers spaced out in front of them, silent and still. Six sets of eyes watched the three of them glide down the hall as a unit, making no sound as they pulled up short in front of the door. 4F.

John and Oliver stood shoulder to shoulder, turned slightly away from each other to cover more area. Dinah’s right shoulder met theirs in the middle, covering Oliver’s blind side from the back and shielded a little by their height and breadth. The two men shared a long look before Oliver nodded once, slowly. Letting John make the call.

The sound of a gunshot exploded behind the door, and Oliver’s earpiece immediately erupted into chatter and shouts. All three of them dove to the right, swiveling away from the door and coming to rest against the wall.

“Shots fired! Shots fired!”

Oliver frowned once, a reaction to the noise in his ear, and adjusted his grip on his sidearm. He glanced at Dig, who was getting the same kind of traffic through his earpiece. 

They both realized at the same time that something wasn’t right.

“It was only one shot,” Oliver said out loud, at the same time Dig shifted away from the wall. “Repeat, it was only one shot fired!” He yelled it, because a feeling of dread was flooding his bloodstream and he needed everyone to shut the hell up for a minute. 

“Oliver—“ 

He ignored Dinah and double checked that he and Dig were on the same page; John’s eyes said he was thinking the same thing. Oliver nodded and watched his friend step up and throw his shoulder into the door once, hard. It gave easily, which meant it hadn’t been locked, spilling both men into the room.

They didn’t stop moving for a few seconds, guns sweeping the room. The lights were off, but candles covered every horizontal surface, bathing the room in ambient light. Their rush into the room had created enough disturbance in the air to blow several of them out, but there was still enough light to see the body slumped forward in a chair across the room.

And the brain matter splattering the wall.

Neither of them spoke as they moved across the room; Oliver knew Dinah had followed them through the door because she was ordering up the EMTs in a low voice, though it was obvious they probably weren’t going to have much to do. 

“Son of a bitch.”

The gun had dropped out of the man’s hand; Oliver held his foot above it, ready to kick it to the side if the brains were somehow just a trick, but otherwise he didn’t want to disturb the scene. He let John lean around the body to check for a pulse, which of course didn’t exist. It couldn’t. He was dead. It was over.

“Hey guys?” Dinah’s voice was coming from the far side of the room; the bedroom, as it turned out. Oliver glanced back to see what John was already looking at: Dinah was in the doorway, her back to them, scanning the space. “Can we get some lights?”

One of John’s agents obliged as he came through the door followed by two EMTS. The light wasn’t much, a bare bulb in the ceiling and a lamp near the window, but it helped illuminate the walls covered in photographs of this man’s grisly pastime. There was no bed in the traditional sense, just a twin mattress on the floor in the corner. A pizza box and a couple of empty chip bags littered the room. A well-used paperback hid behind the single lamp on the floor, almost where the drops of blood began; they marched in a jagged line from the bedroom out the door to the hall.

“This our guy?” Oliver asked quietly, still holding his place behind the body in case it moved. 

Dig’s gaze settled on him. “Looks like it.” He waved a hand at his agent as the EMTs moved in. “Let’s get forensics in here.”

—————————————-

They moved out into the hall to have space for Oliver to relay the stand down order to his captain. John was on the phone too; by the time Oliver had finished his conversation with Pike, Felicity had performed her last song as Angel and was in a police cruiser on her way back to the precinct.

“She’ll stay there until we get done with this,” he told Oliver with a hand raised to hold him in place. “She’s safe. It’s over.”

Oliver focused past his friend’s shoulder, into the apartment and the activity of a crime scene investigation. “Yeah.”

Dinah was leaned back against the wall, staring into space. Oliver watched her for a second before speaking.

“You didn’t know what you were getting into, signing on when you did.”

Her mouth curved up into a tired smile. “It was worth it. I’ve been working with the best.”

Oliver nodded at the floor, though he was thinking about his other partner. An agent called out to John and he stepped back into the room; a minute later he was in the doorway again, his eyes wide and his gaze far away. Oliver’s stomach lurched.

“What is it? John?”

John Diggle swallowed once. “That’s not Adrian Chase.”

——————————————-

They stayed through the photographs, the blood sample retrieval, the removal of the body. The three of them directed the boxing up of evidence, the papers and photographs, his bills and mail. It was close to 3am before they filed back into the police station.

“Where’s the Vic?” Dig asked tiredly, at the head of the group.

“Starling General. Minor injuries. She’ll be released in the morning.”

Oliver cleared a throat gone dry from hours without food or drink. “Get a black and white to pick her up and bring her straight here the minute the paperwork’s signed.”

“On it.” Dinah peeled off for her desk.

Oliver pulled up short and looked at her. “Then you go home.”

“Yeah.”

“Felicity?” he asked the room in general. Another detective nodded toward the captain’s office and Oliver adjusted his course for the back of the room. 

She was curled up asleep on the couch along the wall, an SCPD sweatshirt draped over everything but her feet. A pizza box, the lid partially open, was still lying on Pike’s desk; Oliver hesitated long enough to flip the lid up with a finger to see what was left.

“Hey”, he whispered, bending to a crouch next to her blonde head and dropping a kiss into her hair. Felicity stirred with a little moan and blinked him into focus.

“That took a long time,” she complained, growly but still adorable.

“I know. Sorry.” He kissed her again, a press of his mouth to her forehead. “You ready to go home?”

“Mmm.”

“C’mon.”

He helped her collect her things and gave the pizza box a longing look, but she was already stumbling out the door with her eyes half closed. He turned to follow and almost fell over her where she’d stopped.

“Shouldn’t of fallen asleep in my contacts,” she grumbled. “Did we get Chase? Where’s Dig?”

Oliver sighed, not convinced she was completely awake. “John’s following up with his boss. Felicity, we got the murderer, it just wasn’t Chase.”

“Really?”

“Really. Sometimes it turns out like that.”

She looked like she was trying to process. “But Chase is still a bad guy, right?”

“Oh yeah. He’s done plenty of other things. We were just wrong about him being a serial killer.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah. Let’s go home, honey.”

“Dig?”

“We’ll see him tomorrow.”

———————————————-

Oliver pulled out of her with a groan and a sigh, though she was still clinging to him and breathing heavily from their exertions. It was almost noon, time for him to be up doing police work, but in all fairness, it was Felicity who had suggested it. And what she wanted she always got. 

“Stay,” she pleaded when he rolled out of bed. Oliver snagged his boxer briefs and hiked them up with his back to her.

“I have to call in and see where they are on this guy. But I’ll work from home today if I can.”

Felicity pushed up to rest her head in her hand and let the sheet fall to give him a view. Saucy. “Can we see John today?”

“They released the girl from the hospital this morning, so he’ll be leading her interview. I’ll ask him to dinner, okay?”

“Good.” She let her upper body flop back onto the bed and reached for her pillow. “I want to talk about how we messed this up so bad.”

Oliver smirked and shook his head, then headed off for a shower.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so this chapter is pretty much all smut, for those of you who might be thinking about reading at work. ;) That wasn’t the original intention, but I assumed you wouldn’t mind.

“Robert Raymond Schloman,” Dig announced. “Bobby Ray.” He dropped a pile of reports and photographs onto their dining room table and pulled out a chair. 

Oliver turned with three beers from the fridge and watched Felicity come up to Diggle’s side and begin flipping through the reports. She’d talked him into pizza—mostly, he suspected, to keep him from banging around in the kitchen while she took an afternoon nap. He’d splurged on the good stuff, wood fired artisan pies with ridiculous toppings like goat cheese and tapenade, just because her adorable expressions of skepticism cheered him up in a way he couldn’t describe. 

“Tell me,” she said. “Convince me it was this guy and not Chase.”

Dig ran his hands up over his head. “I didn’t want to believe it either, but it’s all here. He works for the security company that contracted with the first club in Starling. The same company that owned the cameras in that alley. He’s been on the move over the past year, all over the US, a very similar path to Chase’s. Except for Hub City. He never lived there, but his mother does. He was visiting her around the time the three of us met.” Where he would’ve seen her dance at Vertigo-go. Nobody said it, but it hung in the air all the same.

Felicity sat in the chair next to him and pulled the paperwork closer with a frown of concentration. “You said there were photos in his apartment?”

“He snapped them as souvenirs before he left each scene. We found the digital camera, and a color printer.”

Oliver thumped their beers on the table and opened the lid to the first pizza—arugula and smoked provolone—before grabbing a seat. “And our witness?”

“She ID’d him immediately off his drivers license photo. No hesitation. Said he grabbed her as she was crossing the alley behind the apartment building and dragged her up the stairs. We’ve confirmed there were other tenants who heard her screaming.”

“Nobody called 911?” Felicity had gone pale.

“It’s not that kind of neighborhood,” Oliver replied softly. Her eyes flicked to him and he pushed the pizza box closer to her in offering. She didn’t stop frowning. “The tools he used to carve them up were in the bathtub, Felicity. It’s him.”

“So that’s it?”

John sat forward and selected a slice with a little side eye at the toppings. “For now. Chase is still out there for me to find, but I’m back to looking for fraud and embezzlement instead of butchery. Thank God.”

Oliver watched his girlfriend pick a hunk of arugula off her piece. He sighed, because she looked like she still wanted to argue, and he needed her to get on board with this. He’d been thinking all day about the ring box at the back of his dresser drawer, and he wanted it out in the light of day. 

It was time to move on.

John stayed well past dinner. They sat around the table and shared a second round of beers, swapping stories that alternated between gruesome and hilarious long into the night. 

By the time John finally pushed back from the table and fetched his jacket off the back of his chair, Felicity was a little tipsy. She pouted prettily and threw her arms out for a bear hug, a request he fulfilled without hesitation. He hugged Oliver too, a move that required more back slapping than anything; they all found it hard to part at the doorstep.

“I’ll still be around a few days,” he assured them with a soft smile. “There’s plenty of paperwork left to do, and Starling’s still the last known location I have for Chase. You’ll be hearing from me.”

“I’m kinda surprised you didn’t invite Dinah,” Felicity began as Oliver closed the door and switched off the porch light.

“I wanted it to be the three of us tonight. But I’ll ask her soon, if that’s okay.”

She nodded as she walked ahead of him, a sway in her hips that was more about the alcohol than seduction, but did the trick anyway. “I like Dinah. She seems like a good detective.”

“She is,” Oliver said, though he’d stopped thinking about Dinah Drake the minute he started paying attention to the way Felicity fit into those tight-legged jeans. When was the last time they’d made love without the distraction of exhaustion, or fear, or anger? Something more than a semi-public fuck in a seedy club, or a quickie to slake their thirst, like this morning. Too long, he decided, sidling up behind her and slipping his hands under the tail of her shirt to caress her waist.

“Hey,” she said, but soft, and inviting. She slowed enough to let him bump against her from behind, a little nudge to show her what he had in mind for the rest of their evening.

As if she didn’t know already.

Oliver settled his hands lightly on her hips, just enough to stop her forward progress. He dipped his head to press his nose into her hair. They used the same shampoo, but his hair was so short he never smelled it on himself; it seemed exotic, enticing, somehow new, on her. Felicity’s weight shifted back into him, and he felt the perfect roundness of her ass against the front of his jeans. He opened his mouth to ask if he could touch, to palm that perfection and fan the flames already building in his body, but he thought she might laugh. He had been touching her for over a year now; asking permission to worship her still seemed fitting to him, but might sound silly to her. 

He closed his mouth and let his hands wander.

Felicity’s fingers were already working the button and zipper on her jeans; he ran his hands back up to hook his thumbs into the waistband and help her work them down until the lace of her thong appeared. Oliver dropped to his knees and started from her knees down, sliding the denim off one leg and then the other, supporting her as she stepped out of each with a short laugh.

Jeans discarded to the side, he took a moment to look at her, letting his eyes wander over her fantastic curves, the swoop in toward her nipped waist, the dimples above her ass, the sculpted muscles of her thighs and calves. Even barefoot, without the added effect heels could have, she looked strong and lithe, an athlete’s build on a small-boned body. It made him want to wrap himself around her, to protect her, and draw immeasurable strength from her in turn. 

As his eyes wandered up he caught her watching, a look back over her shoulder and a self-satisfied smile that told him she knew he liked what he saw and she was happy about that. Felicity gathered the hem of her shirt in both hands and whipped it over her head and away, which did all kinds of wonderful things to her hair and left him with a view of the bra that matched the thong he was contemplating removing with his teeth. 

“Turn around,” he said instead, a huskier version of his regular voice. She pushed up onto the balls of her feet and turned in a slow pivot, giving him the full effect of her shapely legs and the core that kept her balanced even after more wine than usual.

Her bra was the comfy kind—it probably had a name, but he had no idea what it would be—with no cups or wires or other padding, just stretchy lace that crossed over at the front and didn’t try to hide the fact that her breasts were small. And perfect, he reminded himself, his eyes already seeking out the buds of her nipples pressing against the fabric, and the hollow that promised a valley between her breasts just waiting for exploration. He wanted her both naked and clothed—just like this—the rest of the night. 

Oliver’s gaze wandered south, down over the lines that delineated the muscles of her torso, bunched and hard when she did crunches or executed a pole trick, but now relaxed, feminine, asking for kisses and licks as he passed through on his way to the real treasure. The triangle of fabric that represented the majority of her panties did as much to highlight as it did to cover, a message his brain received and forwarded straight to his dick. He felt it pulse against the restriction of his jeans and swallowed a groan. 

Felicity’s eyes darkened; she’d noticed his discomfort, or maybe the actual bulge in his pants, and the fact that she knew only made him harder. Before he could do it himself she was plucking at his tee shirt, pulling it up and over his head and dropping it carelessly to the side. Oliver’s hands came back up to skim across her rib cage and slide up over the small mounds of her breasts. His thumbs found her nipples through the fabric and circled them slowly, building the pressure bit by bit with the blunt scratching of his nails until she let her face tip to the ceiling with a sigh, transferring her weight back onto her heels so her hips could shift closer to him. 

“Oliver...” 

It was breathy, almost a whisper. A request and a command all at once. He shifted forward and up from where he’d been sitting on his heels so his mouth was even with her breasts, letting his breath warm them as he continued to circle her nipples with his fingertips, bringing them to hard points that begged to be sucked. With a glance up at her tipped-back chin he lipped one lightly—mostly just a caress of his upper lip and the humidity of his breath—but it pulled a groan out of her that nearly toppled him. He went back in, more intent this time, pulling the bud into his mouth in a suck that dragged her forward and off balance so that she had to plant her palms on his shoulders to stay upright.

Oliver moved across to the other, neglected one, leaving the first exposed to the air under damp fabric. He glanced back at it, waiting proud and erect, and moaned quietly at the torturous confines of his pants. She was whispering his name on a loop, soft panting breaths that made him want to come just listening to her. Could he push her over the edge like this, he wondered, but the musky perfume drifting up from between her legs met his nostrils and short circuited his brain before he could formulate a plan to find out. Something primal rose up in Oliver’s chest, the thing that had awakened in puberty and left him a nervous, rutty mess for most of a decade. It demanded he take her, fill her, empty himself inside her, claiming her as his own.

He managed to ignore the demand and continued to worship her with his mouth. 

Felicity had removed one hand from him and was pulling a bra strap free of her shoulder, so he slid his fingers up under the fabric of the other and slipped it down her arm, freeing her breasts to reveal their dark pink nipples and goose-bumped flesh. Oliver used the flat of his tongue to cover one and then the other, dirtier now, wilder. He let his teeth barely scrape them and she shuddered violently, a spasm that seemed to start at her toes and buck through her torso. One of her legs lifted briefly from the floor, like she wanted to hook it over his shoulder but wasn’t sure how. 

He realized then that they’d never made it out of the living room, and that the back of the couch was the perfect place for this kind of maneuver. Without pulling away from her breasts he claimed her waist with both hands and pivoted her toward it, stopping only when her ass settled against the back. 

She was scrabbling with the bra—useless now—pulling it up and off as he ran a hand down her side to the leg she wanted somewhere else; he lifted it up and over his shoulder, knowing how damp she was already and wondering how he’d survive the night if he didn’t take her immediately. 

“Felicity,” he murmured, peppering her stomach with soft kisses as he moved back down her body to the elastic settled against her hipbones, the last barrier he had to cross. His jeans were becoming nightmarish and threatening to cause him irreparable damage; with a little noise at the back of his throat he left off with the kisses long enough to shift back and work them off his hips. She held her balance, extending her leg as he leaned away and subsequently showing off the damp spot on the fabric covering her center. As soon as his cock bobbed free of its confinement, he swooped in and sucked the spot with abandon.

“Holy shit...Oliver...”

Her clit was there too, puffed and needy, outlined perfectly through her soaked panties. Oliver lipped it through the fabric as she bumped her hips against his mouth, seeking pressure instinctively and obviously wanting more than she was getting. He hummed against her center, feeling the vibration fed back to him through the slick fabric, and wondered—not for the first time—what it must feel like for her. His fingers slid up the outside of one thigh and curved back around and under that perfect ass, pushing beneath the little bit of fabric and seeking the source of the wetness. He pushed his middle finger inside her with a twist that made her gasp.

The long slow pumps of his finger almost pushed him over the edge, making him wonder how she was still hanging on herself; he continued the onslaught against her clit, sucking hard through the fabric as he fucked her with his finger. 

“I’m gonna...I’m gonna...Oliver, I’m gonna...”

Felicity’s head snapped back as she came, back arching as her body undulated through the waves of pleasure. Oliver couldn’t concentrate on anything but the rhythm of his finger without exploding himself, pumping into her as the orgasm moved through her body. He knew she was done when she pushed back against his shoulders, over sensitive now and wanting him to leave off with his mouth. He pressed one last kiss to the spot and pulled back, but continued the long, slow drags of his finger in and out, not letting her come completely down from her release. 

Felicity pushed back on his shoulders again, but this time she was making it clear she wanted to be in charge. A wicked grin broke over his face, because he wasn’t ready to be done working her over with his finger, and by the way she was flexing back against him every time he thrust in, she wasn’t either. 

He added a finger and increased his speed.

She was making a different noise now, an Mmmm sound with her lips closed. Her eyes shut and her head tipped back again, riding his fingers and circling her nipples with light touches of her fingers that made him groan. 

“You gonna...?” he choked out, beginning to feel it in his forearm as she nodded loosely at the ceiling.

“Yesssssss.”

The need to relieve pressure of his own made him release the hand securing her thigh against his shoulder and drift down to cover his own rock hard length, stroking himself in time to the pump of his fingers inside her. Through slitted eyes he watched her pinch and pull her nipples; her hips began to swivel against his hand, finding a spot where his knuckles could drag against her clit as he twisted his hand. Her leg dropped from his shoulder as her movements became sharper, more urgent; the muscles in his arm really began to burn. He had to leave off rocking into his own fist or risk finishing before he ever got inside her.

He groaned her name, a long drawn out sound that made her fall forward with a jerk as another orgasm took her; a harder, sharper one, he could tell by the tiny furrow between her brows. She’d been over-sensitized by the first one maybe; she’d described the sensation to him before. 

A glance down between their bodies showed him a purple headed monster, straining for release and painful in that way only sex could be. A slide of his fingers to shift the panties out of the way and he could be in, buried inside her and relieving the pressure. But the living room carpet didn’t seem like a very romantic spot for whoever was on the bottom, so with only a slight flounder getting to his feet with jeans still bunched at his knees, Oliver removed the rest of his clothing, collected her against him, and lifted her into his arms for the trip to their bedroom.

Thank God they rarely made up the bed, he thought as he planted one knee against the sheets and tried not to toss her onto the mattress. Felicity bounced a little anyway, she was so light, but managed to make it look incredibly sexy all the same. Oliver crawled forward as she scooted back, making room for him to join her and wriggling out of her panties at the same time. 

He could finally get a good look at her, naked and spread open in front of him, smooth except for a tiny, wispy strip she liked to keep above her clit. Despite the fact that she’d just come twice—and that he was still battling a raging hard on—Oliver wanted to bury his mouth against her, to really taste her, to explore the folds of her and make her body spasm against him a third time. But she was contracting her core, sitting up to reach for his biceps and drag him closer, ready for him.

He obeyed.

He let himself rest on top of her for just a minute, his forearms taking most of his weight and the head of his cock just skimming her slit. He kissed her, long and slow and dirty, dragging it out until she lifted her hips to trap his dick between their bodies hard enough to make him see stars. He growled, a rumble that began deep in his chest as he used one hand to press her hipbone back onto the bed and then guide himself inside her. 

Felicity’s head dropped back against the mattress as he pushed inside her, a slide made infinitely easier by her wetness. He moaned her name as he bottomed out, pausing long enough to let himself feel every inch buried inside her. Her legs came up around him, powerful thighs locking around his hips as she lifted her ass off the bed to give him even greater access. 

He closed his eyes and began to move. 

Oliver had never loved anyone the way he loved Felicity Smoak. There had been other women, none of them as special as Sara, but even his love for her had been more about the novelty and the pursuit, not the day to day, year to year living, all the tiny moments that made up a life. He woke every morning knowing he was choosing Felicity, and she was choosing him, and that knowledge had brought him a peace he’d never known. She was the piece of him he’d always been missing, his whole damn life; whether he was making terrible choices or celebrating personal triumphs, Felicity was the element that would’ve made those moments better. Complete. 

He’d loved her from that moment in her apartment, John Diggle bleeding onto her couch, when she’d stopped him from leaving for medical supplies so she could make sure he wasn’t shot too. She’d made him prove it, checking every inch of his torso with shaking hands and teeth chattering so hard he could hear them, strung out on shock and adrenaline but worried about HIM. Oliver had needed her like oxygen ever since, and in this moment, his body joined to hers, he knew it would always be true.

He moved in slow thrusts, though his body screamed for More, Faster, Harder. He wanted to make it last as long as possible for both of them, this feeling of wholeness. She rose with him, syncing the roll of her body against his so he pulled back and fell into her like an ocean wave crashing onto a beach; her cries were the seabirds. He thought of their first time, in Hawaii, and the perfection of that moment. On their last night they’d snuck down to the beach and made love on the sand, wild and quick, then lingered to leave kisses across each other’s shoulders as they listened to the water surge in time with their breathing. 

He was losing his fight with control, shaking with the effort to rein in his release, so he rolled them and put her on top. Felicity sighed and pushed off his chest to sit up, rising off him and sliding back with her eyes closed and her head thrown back. 

She set the pace, a steady rocking motion that let him breathe for a second without fear that he would explode without a good buildup. Sometimes she could get another one, in this position, so he calmed his breathing and let her work. 

Her moans changed in pitch, and that’s when Oliver knew she was close. He began to move again, matching her pace and watching her face change as she chased the tension coiling in the single spot he was hitting over and over. Felicity’s mouth dropped open in a soundless cry and he let go, finally free to drift in sensation. It hit him a second before she went, the explosion of nerve endings that flooded his body with pleasure and left him shaking as she shuddered in ecstasy above him and then collapsed into his arms. She left a trail of slow kisses against his neck and he hugged her close, still coming down from his release inside her and having no wish to move again. Ever. 

He whispered “I love you” as he drifted off to sleep.

———————————————

The first thing Oliver woke to the next morning was the buzz of a text. He rolled away from the stunningly beautiful backside he was nestled against and squinted at the message:

We won. It’s quiet. Ask her. 

He blinked furiously to bring the caller ID into focus, expecting it to be a directive from John, but it was actually Dinah’s number. Oliver grinned tiredly and texted back a thumbs up emoji, then shut the phone into his nightstand drawer so he could resume burrowing against Felicity’s warm and very naked body.

“You wanna go out tonight?” he murmured an hour later. She was climbing out of bed, clearly eager to return to work after a week of hiding out either at home or inside the precinct. “I feel like we should go somewhere special. To celebrate.”

“Celebrate what?” Her voice was scratchy from sleep, which he found sexy as hell. Despite the gymnastics of the previous night, his morning wood found a new reason to live. 

“All this being over.” And other things just beginning, he added to himself. He felt sappy and sweet and had to fight hard to keep a stupid grin off his face.

Felicity was busy running both hands through her hair as she ambled toward the bathroom. “Special as in fancy?” She didn’t sound convinced. “You already made me eat your fancy pizza. What’s next? Snails?”

“We can go wherever you want. Doesn’t have to be fancy.” Oliver propped his head in his hand to see more of her. “Just tell me where and when.”

He heard nothing back right away, but then the toilet flushed and the shower started, and ten seconds after that her head appeared around the corner. 

“How ‘bout Chinese?”


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The perfect song to play on repeat for this chapter: The Beast (Instrumental), by Imogen Heap.

It was becoming a regular thing, the Work Wives awaiting her arrival at her desk. Marisol put a hand on her forehead with a motherly frown as she walked up; the others herded behind her, expectant.

“Were you sick? Nobody would tell us why you weren’t here. Did it have to do with that security guard hanging around your desk? Was it Oliver?” She stopped in Felicity’s way and stuck a hand on her hip. “Did he hurt you? We were worried!” 

Felicity brushed her off with an indulgent eye roll. “Of course it wasn’t Oliver. We’re fine. We’re...perfect, practically.” She plopped into her chair with a suppressed sigh of pleasure; home sweet nerd home. The girls lingered, finding excuses to fill her in on company gossip in hopes of getting her to spill, but after a couple of minutes she made shooing motions with her hands and promised them time at lunch to ask all their questions.

Not that she’d answer truthfully to most of them. 

The hectic morning of catching up kept her brain peacefully quiet, but by lunchtime her fingers were getting itchy to do their own research on Bobby Ray Schloman. He just didn’t seem for real, after all the build up to their perp being Adrian Chase. Perp. Felicity grinned to herself, feeling like a little kid playing cops and robbers. She was definitely not cut out for the life Oliver—or even John—led, but it was fun to imagine as long as she was sitting safe and sound inside Palmer Tech. 

She enjoyed lunch more than she’d planned, even if she had to endure the good-natured third degree from her girlfriends. They loved hearing all the dirt about Oliver’s beautiful new partner—there wasn’t much, and they pretty much filled in the gaps Felicity left open with their own speculations—and took her explanation that Oliver had been on a “sensitive case” which had put her in “temporary danger” at face value. 

When the afternoon quiet had settled in, Felicity’s thoughts again veered to their surprise serial killer, so with a furtive glance around at her fellow worker bees and a bite of her lip, Felicity dove into the Internet.

All of it.

She started with the security company and the mysteriously malfunctioning cameras. A good title for her first detective novel, she thought with grim optimism. She’d been in here before, the day she met Dinah, when the idea had first come up that something might be hinky about the company. But—frustratingly—that time she’d found nothing amiss, or even weird. 

With a swig from her water bottle Felicity went in again, poring over every line and photo on the company’s webpage, looking for a mention of Bobby Ray. He was there, on the Meet Our Associates page, an overweight, balding thirty-something, shiny, but not in the “happy people” way. More like the “vaguely creepy” way, she thought with a shudder. Still, he didn’t scream serial killer, though which ones throughout history ever did, really? 

She shook her head to get herself back on task, and began picking at the edges of the company’s firewall, looking for a way in. It took a laughable three minutes and thirty-one seconds; not a record, but pretty pathetic, security-wise. Nothing stood out to her at first, just the usual administrative tools, a standard cookie cutter website program that any small time webmaster living in his mom’s basement could maintain. 

Andrea distracted her by stopping to chat on her way to the restroom, and when Felicity finally looked back at the screen something caught her eye for a second. She scrolled back through, trying to find it, the abnormality in the lines of code, but nothing stood out on a second perusal. She sighed and rubbed her eyes beneath her glasses; time to put it to bed. They caught the guy. It was over. She needed to move on.

Felicity’s phone buzzed with a text as she was shutting the electronic back door of the website and erasing her presence. It was Oliver:

Still on for Chinese tonight?

She grinned and picked up her phone:

YASSSS

Name the time. 

6:00?

Sounds good. Meet you there. 

Felicity was still smiling when she set the phone down to get back to work. 

————————————

John treated Oliver and Dinah to lunch before their final debrief with Captain Pike. The weather was perfect, with the kind of fluffy white clouds and clear blue sky that lulled non-natives into believing the Pacific Northwest was a pleasant place to live. Despite the successful conclusion to their case—and the nice day—the three of them were quiet, each thinking about the human cost to solving the crime.

“So. Back to following Chase?” 

Oliver asked the question with his water glass at his lips, a pause in his quest to suck an ice cube into his mouth; he was always too optimistic about his tolerance for the spice in Indian food. John’s eyebrows lifted briefly, though he was focused on finishing his Chicken Korma. 

“Back to following Chase,” he echoed softly. His eyes flicked up to his friend. “I’m gonna miss your help.” He grinned briefly. “And your cooking.”

Dinah shot her partner a surprised look. “You cook?”

Oliver shook his head, but he was smiling. “My skills are greatly over exaggerated, I assure you.”

She didn’t seem convinced of his modesty. “Well, it’s clear Felicity’s a lucky girl.” She nudged Oliver’s arm with her elbow. “When’s it gonna happen, big guy?”

John gave him a look that was both curious and knowing, and Oliver blushed crimson. Dinah gave John a wink.

“He’s got a ring. I’ve seen it. Well, the box.”

John began to smile, a slow bloom of joy that made Oliver grin. 

“Okay, alright, enough. I’m doing it tonight, okay?” He tossed his napkin on the table in mock frustration. “You happy?”

John reached across the table to clasp his hand and squeeze a congratulations; he and Dinah were both laughing. Oliver leaned back in his seat and let himself enjoy the moment.

————————————

He texted Felicity to plan their dinner as he was walking into Pike’s office, the tail end of the sizable debrief team. Seats were at a premium, but Diggle shifted over on the couch to make a space and he sat with a sigh. 

“This better not take all day,” Oliver muttered. Dig’s raised eyebrows agreed with every word.

The captain cleared his throat. “Folks, we’ve got a high profile story on our hands. The coroner has requested we send a representative from both SCPD and the FBI to act as witnesses to the autopsy of our suspect, which will be happening in—“ he glanced at his watch—“two hours. Who are my volunteers?”

Oliver’s heart sank. 

Beside him, Dig leaned forward and coughed once, catching Dinah’s eye across the small space. “I’m in.”

“Me too,” Dinah added quickly, jumping in to save Oliver. He shot her a grateful look.

Pike eyed Oliver for an extended moment, letting him know he saw what was going on, but he cleared his throat and moved ahead.

Oliver breathed a sigh of relief: evening saved.

—————————————

Despite the recent absence from work, Felicity skipped out an hour early, anxious to get home and change into something more casual for dinner with Oliver. She was fine if he wanted to celebrate, but she wasn’t doing it in a skirt and heels.

The pile of mail and packages stacked on the table inside the front door screamed her name as she stepped into the townhouse. Felicity groaned as she dropped her bag on the floor and trudged over to make herself at least sort out the junk. Her eye wandered over their living space and everything that had been neglected lately; this weekend they’d carve out some time to pick up and clean. 

At the bottom of the pile she found a box, and frowned at it. She couldn’t remember ordering anything; maybe it was Oliver’s? She gathered it up with the rest of the mail and transferred it to the kitchen counter, then rooted one handed through the junk drawer until she found the scissors. She swore lightly as a stack of letters slithered off the counter, but ignored them in favor of slicing open the tape on the box and opening the flaps.

The box was empty. 

—————————————

Not one to overuse accolades, Pike released them with a wave of his hand. Oliver stood with John and Dinah, and tried to ignore the giant swarm of butterflies that rose up in his stomach whenever he thought about dinner. John laid a hand on his shoulder.

“You okay? You look a little pale.”

Oliver huffed a nervous laugh and nodded at the floor. “I’m good. It’ll be good.” And then a little softer. “She’ll say yes, right?”

Dinah patted his arm. “Of course she will.” 

He looked up from the floor to meet her caramel colored eyes and had to swallow a surprising lump of emotion.

“Everything will be alright,” she promised softly, before turning to go.

John lifted a hand in a goodbye and followed her from the room.

“When do you go back?” Oliver asked suddenly, stepping out of the office. 

“Day after tomorrow,” John threw over his shoulder. “Plenty of time for me to see that ring.”

————————————

Felicity tried on three different shirts before she found one that worked best with the black jeans and low cut boots. She didn’t have time to wash her hair again, but she wet it down enough to erase the crease from her work ponytail. A little magic with the hair dryer and curling iron, a touch of lipstick, and she was out the door.

————————————-

The morgue was low on the list of John Diggle’s favorite places to spend a late afternoon. He followed Dinah into the elevator and pressed the button for the basement level with a sigh.

The coroner met them at the door and led them through to the exam room and the table holding a sheet-covered serial killer, minus most of his brains. The Medical Examiner was waiting in the background, already gowned, gloved, and masked. John suppressed the need to wrinkle his nose and stood with Dinah where the coroner indicated, then waited while the man opened a file folder and cleared his throat. He held a small tape recorder in one hand.

“The autopsy of Robert Raymond Schloman, case file 11900, as witnessed by FBI agent John Diggle and SCPD Detective Dinah Drake.” 

John was studying the rows of cooler drawers, so we wasn’t looking when the coroner suddenly made a gurgling sound.

Beside him, Dinah gasped.

—————————————

Oliver had snuck his second best suit into work with him, but even the whistles and cat calls from the other guys in the precinct’s locker room couldn’t dampen his enthusiasm. He talked a uni into checking on the whereabouts of the captain before sneaking out to his desk; the ring box was hidden in the bottom drawer.

He slipped it into the pocket of his suit jacket and headed for the parking lot.

—————————————

Felicity made it to the restaurant fifteen minutes early, but she hated to keep the car running just for her air conditioned comfort, so she stepped into the darkened interior of the little hole-in-the-wall restaurant and smiled at the hostess.

“Table for two?”

It was just a booth, one in a row of booths down the wall of the restaurant; the vinyl seat on her side was a bit lumpy, but she slid in without complaint and smiled when the hostess turned over her tea cup and set a little kettle on the table. 

“A glass of red wine too, please,” she said softly, not sure why she felt so nervous. 

—————————————

The chatter came over his radio when he was still fifteen minutes out from the restaurant; Oliver turned up the volume on the dispatcher’s frequency without taking his eyes off the road.

“10-33, officer down, Coroner’s Office, possible multiple homicides, all units respond.”

Oliver’s blood went cold. John and Dinah. He flipped on his sedan’s sirens and powered over the median into the opposite lane, heading back downtown. 

————————————-

Felicity checked the time on her phone and then flipped it face down. Five minutes late was pretty close to on time for Oliver.  
Behind her, on the other side of the swinging kitchen door, someone dropped a pot. And then several. She grimaced in embarrassment on that poor person’s behalf and began fiddling idly with her napkin.

————————————-

Oliver’s phone buzzed on the passenger seat with an incoming call. He was still six minutes out from the coroner’s office, but he could already hear multiple sirens descending on the same spot. He thought about ignoring the call, but finally scooped it up and answered.

“Queen,” Pike said. 

“Is it Dinah?” he asked, tight and breathless.

“Oliver, I’m sorry. There was nothing they could do.”

Oliver sucked in a shuddering breath. “Dig?” His voice cracked; he cleared his throat and tried again. “Agent Diggle.”

“He’s being rushed to Starling General. We won’t know for a while yet. The Coroner’s dead too.”

Oliver swallowed down the bile that rose in his throat at the thought of his friend fighting for his life. “I should go. To the hospital—“

“Oliver.” His captain’s firm voice cut through the middle of his sentence. “Agent Diggle was still conscious when the first officers arrived. He’s the one who called it in. Oliver, he said to give you a message.” Oliver’s knuckles turned white as he gripped the steering wheel. “It was two words: Adrian Chase.”

Oliver slammed on the brakes and turned the big car back toward the Chinese restaurant. 

————————————-

“Excuse me, Miss?”

Felicity jumped when a hand landed on her shoulder. She turned her head, hand on her chest in shock, to the man standing next to the back of her booth. He smiled at her, and as she opened her mouth to respond, it struck her how blue his eyes were.

“It’s time to go,” he said softly, almost pleasantly, and jerked her out of the booth by her hair.

Too surprised to scream, Felicity’s hands rose to cover his hand in her hair, her breath gone from the pain of being half-dragged backwards across the room toward the kitchen. The restaurant was hardly bustling; an elderly man and woman gaped as she was dragged by, but didn’t offer to help. Above her, she heard the man with the blue eyes say “Caught my wife cheating again,” in a breathy voice edged with both steel and amusement. The couple, still shocked but now also embarrassed, looked away.

Felicity found her voice just as they reached the swinging door into the kitchen, gasping a “No!” and twisting furiously, though she felt her hair tear at the roots. The man bent forward and wrapped his free hand around her waist, and suddenly her feet were off the floor and he was swinging her bodily through the door, launching her forward onto the floor in an unceremonious heap. Her forehead bounced off the rounded edge of the stainless steel counter, surprising her more than hurting her. 

“Wha—“

She started to crawl away from him, only to be caught and dragged back with brutal efficiency. She whimpered in fear, waiting for his next move. Where was the kitchen staff? Would one of them help her? She kept her head down, anticipating a blow, but tried to get a look around; legs stuck out into the aisle way just beyond her, and around the door of a walk-in freezer she saw another body on the floor. Oh god oh god oh god. 

Oliver.

—————————————-

He didn’t decrease his speed as the light came up for the strip mall parking lot; Oliver skidded through the turn, narrowly missing an oncoming pickup truck that blared its horn in annoyance. Her car was there, parked in front of the restaurant.

He prayed, with little hope, that she was still sitting inside it.

The interior of the restaurant was dark compared to the late afternoon sunshine outside; Oliver had a flash of memory: a darkened bar, a dead girl that he recognized —

He slammed a lid on those thoughts and threw himself past the hostess stand, looking for Felicity. The place was almost empty; besides an ancient couple staring at him, he was alone.

“Felicity!” He bellowed her name before turning to the old couple, his arms raised in question. The old lady pointed a shaking hand toward the kitchen door, all the prompting he needed. Oliver ran.

—————————————-

Oliver’s dressed up. 

The thought came to Felicity in a detached way, as if she wasn’t really in the room at all, but watching it from above, or maybe on television. The man with the blue eyes and the breathy voice was standing to the side of the swinging door; she realized too late he was waiting for Oliver.

“Fel—“

His eyes were on her, only her, slumped in a heap on the floor of a restaurant kitchen, so he never saw the man step up behind him and wrap a muscled arm around his neck. Felicity managed to scream a warning, but by then, of course, it was too late. Oliver tried to twist away, a grimace of shock on his face, but the other man was ready for that, and hung on tight. 

She watched her boyfriend’s eyes roam the space for a weapon, something to fight back with, and for a brief second she thought he’d be able to reach the handle of a pot. Her own legs finally began to respond, gathering her feet under her to get up and help, but before either of them could make any progress she saw the man lift his free arm above his head. The needle of a syringe caught the light and winked before falling to plunge into Oliver’s upper arm.

Felicity shrieked. She made it to her feet as the man dragged him past—Oliver’s eyes were already half closed, his movements slowing like he was fighting under water—but the back of the man’s hand caught her hard across the face and knocked her back to the floor. 

Felicity’s vision strobed and then grayed out; she wasn’t positive she didn’t lose consciousness altogether for a second. She pressed the palm of her hand against her cheekbone, surprised to find it intact. 

By the time she managed to lift her blurry eyes from the floor, she was alone.

Oliver was gone.


	11. Chapter 11

Oliver was dressed up.

Felicity stared off into space, thinking about that suit, the nice one. Not the nice nice one—the funeral/wedding one—the one he wore to court appearances, but still. Dressed up. For a date at a crappy Chinese restaurant she loved.

She was still sitting in it, the crappy Chinese restaurant, hunched sideways into the booth (not her original one—no), wrapped in the kind of blanket cops pulled out of the trunks of their cars for victims. She wasn’t alone anymore either. The place was absolutely humming with activity, uniformed police and EMTs with gurneys, and a guy who might be a fire marshall. He looked official, anyway. They all either stopped to kneel next to her booth and offer her soft condolences, or ignored her entirely.

She preferred being ignored.

Another pair of authoritative-looking legs passed her unfocused sight line; a new hum of conversation happened on the edge of her hearing, and then the legs came back.

“Miss Smoak. Felicity.”

Her eyes lifted to the source of the noise.

“I’m Captain Pike.”

They’d met before, but the reminder was nice. She blinked her recognition. He squatted next to her knee, careful not to touch her.

“I’m not here to ask you any questions.” He paused, and she thought that might be it, but then his hand came up slowly into her view.

“The investigators found this in the kitchen. We think it might be yours.”

His hand was open, palm up, and there was a small box resting on it.

Felicity stared at it, confused. It wasn’t hers. He raised his palm slightly, an offer for her to take it, to look closer. Her hand hardly shook as she extracted it from the blanket and plucked the box from his palm.

As soon as she lifted the lid she knew.

“Agent Diggle,” she whispered after a long, long time.

Pike hadn’t moved from his spot, one arm resting on the table edge for balance. “It looked worse than it is. He’s going to be fine. Would you like to see him?”

She closed the lid of the ring box and nodded at the space above Pike’s head.

\------------------------------------------------------------

The captain took her himself, in his own car. Not even the standard issue unmarked sedan Oliver had. It always made her a little uncomfortable, riding with him after hours in his work vehicle, but sometimes he insisted. Because of her love affair with compact cars, he said. It was one of their favorite arguments.

Pike cleared his throat. “There was always going to be a threat from Slade Wilson, we knew that when we took Oliver back on. We’ll get him back.”

Felicity had been staring sightlessly through the windshield, but at his words she turned her gaze to the side of his face. Her brows contracted faintly in the middle, the first her expression had changed from basic blank in an hour.

“You think...this was Slade?”

The Captain’s eyes flicked to her and back to the road. “Absolutely. This is retaliation.”

Felicity blinked twice, allowing her focus to swing back to the road ahead. She lifted a hand to run through her hair, uncharacteristically down for their date, and remembered too late the tenderness of her scalp; she winced and dropped the hand to her lap with a shaky breath. The ring box sat there, foreign, sharp and defined in a world gone fuzzy and blank. Her thumbnail traced the seam of the box lid, but she was careful not to open it again.

Pike pulled up to the hospital and parked right out front, in the spot you weren’t supposed to leave your car, but that was a cop for you. She waited for him to come around and open her door, still not with it entirely. A nice EMT had checked her out immediately back at the restaurant; nothing broken, he’d said, but a mild chance of a concussion thanks to that slap. One side of her face felt three sizes too big; it must be a black and blue mess already.

Then Pike’s hand was under her elbow, lifting her gently from the car and steering her inside.

“Would you like a wheelchair?” he asked once, when she wobbled. She ignored him and walked on.

As soon as they stepped out of the elevator onto the floor, Felicity’s heart began to race. The hall went on forever, endless turns, endless voices murmuring in a hundred care-related conversations not about her as they passed doorway after doorway looking for one particular room. It was hard to catch her breath.

Pike paused finally, and rapped his knuckles softly on an open door.

“Yeah. Come in.”

Felicity heard John’s voice and began to cry.

\------------------------------------------------------------

THREE HOURS EARLIER

John was looking at the stainless steel doors of the morgue coolers, counting them, because he’d never been super good at autopsies. The coroner wanted a witness, right? Not an assistant. He had the Medical Examiner for that anyway.

The drone of the coroner’s voice capturing the moment for public record trailed off to a surprised gurgle at the same time Dinah, beside him, gasped.

And then the ME was standing next to him, his gloved hand against Dinah’s throat, slashing across as her arm came up to try to block. John reached out instinctively to push them apart, but it was already hard to see with all the blood. With a grunt he tried a tackle instead, throwing his body at the gowned stranger in an attempt to take him down. His feet slipped against the floor—there was blood everywhere—and the three of them went down together.

Then the man was on him, a scalpel flashing in his face wildly; John got an arm up to protect his face and took the first cuts there, while he was trying to roll them. But his legs were trapped under Dinah’s weight; he’d have to kick free of her to be able to move properly.

A downward sweep of the man’s arm got past his guard, and then there was a slice above his eyebrow that immediately began leaking blood into his eye. John was yelling like a mead-drunk Viking, half-blind from the blood pouring down his face and encumbered by Dinah’s body, which didn’t appear to have moved since they all fell.

Above him, completely silent in contrast to his own bellowing, the attacker flung away the scalpel and captured John’s head between both his hands. The third bang of his skull against the floor turned John’s world to black.

\------------------------------------------------------

Felicity could only make out a blurry lump in the hospital bed through her tears; Captain Pike put his hand beneath her elbow again and escorted her into the room.

“Felicity,” she heard John say, but she was already stumbling forward to crash headlong into his broad chest. He caught her up in his arms, one of which was wrapped from wrist to elbow in gauze and bandages; her knee hooked the mattress to push herself forward as he pulled her in.

“Dig—“

“Felicity, I’m sorry.”

She sobbed into his shoulder as he held her tight, though the wires attached to both him and a beeping machine kept getting in the way, and the canned laughter on the tv felt wildly inappropriate. When the first wave of emotions had ebbed, she began to pay more attention to the low rhythm of male voices conversing over her head. They weren’t using Oliver’s name, but she knew they were talking about him.

“What happened?” Pike asked softly.

She felt John’s head shake, a careful movement because of the head injury. “The ME attacked us. It happened fast. First the coroner, from across the room...”

He trailed off, and Felicity thought maybe he was describing something with a hand motion instead of words. To protect her, probably.

“...then he was on us. It was so fast. I couldn’t do anything to save her.”

Her? Felicity raised her head, really listening now. John glanced at her, hesitant, and sighed.

“Dinah.”

“Oh my god, no.” Except for her cheekbone, Felicity’s face drained of color.

John frowned in confusion. “They didn’t tell you?”

“They said it was a detective...they didn’t say...” And then she was crying again. He squeezed her close.

“What else?” Pike was sympathetic but insistent.

John cleared his throat. “We fought. He knocked me out. I called it in as soon as I came to. How long—?”

“Eighteen minutes, we think.”

John whispered “shit” under his breath.

“What can you tell us? Did you recognize him?”

“I...for a minute I thought I did.” He winced, Felicity still clutched to him like a security blanket. She had fallen quiet; it was impossible to tell if she was paying attention to the conversation going on around her. “You’re sure it was Slade Wilson?”

Pike had his arms folded across his chest and his stance wide. “The chatter about retaliation has increased since the anniversary of his arrest. We were expecting something, we just didn’t know what. I was actually going to make Queen take some vacation time, now that we have Schloman.” He freed a hand to run up over his face. “Jesus.”

Their conversation dropped away until the tv was the only sound in the room. Felicity sniffed just as a hand that didn’t belong to John touched her shoulder lightly.

“Felicity? Is there anyone you’d like me to call, to take you home?”

Felicity sniffed as delicately as possible with her face still buried in Dig’s hospital gown. Her mother lived in Vegas, she did little outside of work with the Wives, and John was laid up in the hospital. With Oliver gone, there was no one.

“Would you like to stay here tonight?” John asked softly next to her ear. She didn’t even have to think about it before nodding. Pike’s hand patted her shoulder gently and then moved away.

“We’re putting an officer on your door tonight. I’ll let you know if we learn anything new.”

Felicity waited until she could no longer hear the captain’s footsteps before sitting back a little to get a good look at John.

“Do you think it was Slade?”

His hands free of her, John ran a hand over the top of his head. “I don’t know. I thought it was—“ He sighed. “I don’t know what I thought. But Slade’s a good bet.”

The room was already hospital-chilly, but the mention of Slade Wilson’s name made new goosebumps rise on Felicity’s arms.

\-----------------------------------------------------

A nurse brought a sheet and blanket for the pullout couch clearly designed to discourage overnight visitors. Felicity finally got a look at herself in the bathroom mirror; it was hard to say which puffiness was due to the injury and which was from crying, but either way she didn’t look good. The lights were low when she came out.

“Fair warning, Pike gave away your secret to my nurse, so you’re officially under concussion protocol too. See you every two hours.”

Felicity stared at the covers on her temporary bed for a long moment before looking at John again.

“Is he dead?”

John didn’t look away, but he didn’t answer right away either.

“Truth?”

She nodded.

“Not yet, but I don’t know for how long.”

\-----------------------------------------------------

The night was just as bad as she expected; the nurses whispering through shift change at 7am woke her for good. She waited until they left before slipping into the bathroom, but did everything she needed in the dark to avoid another look in the mirror. Then she folded her sheet and blanket and sat quietly until John woke up. The ring box sat next to her on the couch.

The hospital released him by late morning. The officer on their door drove them both to the townhouse to clean up, and to wait for the call from the precinct to come in for questioning. Her stomach made a gurgling noise as they walked through the door; it was time to think about eating.

“You hungry?” Felicity asked without looking back.

“Not really. But sure.”

It almost made her smile. “We don’t have any Vienna sausages.” John huffed out a breath, surprised, and the assault of memories threatened to make her cry.

She turned away so he wouldn’t see her lose it—once again—and as she did her eye fell on the package she had opened after work the day before; the one that had been delivered to them empty. Her brow knit in a frown. They’d been told not to look at TVs or computer screens for a couple of days to give their brains a chance to rest, but Felicity scooped up her tablet anyway, lunch forgotten and concussion protocol be damned. She had a mystery to solve.

Their front door had a security camera; all she had to do was figure out when the box was delivered. She closed her eyes and tipped her head to the ceiling, thinking back over the last couple of weeks. Then she remembered: the morning after she’d kicked Oliver out for keeping the investigation from her, she’d checked the cam from work to see if he’d come home to change. A box had been delivered that morning.

She dove in to the files until she found the right date, then began to scan. There. 9:23am. That was the box. She watched the footage of it being set down on her porch three times before she thought to look at the body delivering it.

Her blood ran cold.

“Dig!”

He’d been staring out the front window, but turned quickly at her cry. Felicity held the tablet out for him, already turning away for the kitchen. He fumbled the pass off and almost dropped it.

“What...the hell?” John was alternating looks between the tablet and her, trying to make sense of...anything. “What am I looking at?”

Felicity was slamming the junk drawer closed, a small craft knife in her hand. She approached the box like it might be armed, circling the table slowly as she studied it from all angles.

“Security footage of our front door. The morning this empty package was delivered. That’s the guy who assaulted me.” She flashed him a look. “That’s the guy who took Oliver.”

John stared at the screen, running the footage back several times, but Felicity wasn’t watching him. She was running her fingers over the sides of the box, checking the edges for signs of tampering.

“Felicity...that’s...” He trailed off, making her look up at him. She froze at the look on his face.

“You know him?”

“That’s Adrian Chase.”

The knife dropped from her fingers onto the table and rolled a few inches, forgotten.

“Then why didn’t he...”

“Felicity—“

“Why didn’t he take me? I was right there...”

\---------------------------------------------------

John Diggle opened his eyes and saw only red. His head hurt like a son of a bitch. His face felt sticky; his fingers came away covered in blood. His good eye was staring at cold white ceiling tiles, except some of them were splattered red, like an avant-garde artist had flicked a paintbrush at them for fun.

Sitting straight up was a no go. Maybe if he rolled over first—

Dinah Drake lay face up at his feet, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. It was her blood that had decorated the tiles above them. The body of the coroner was just beyond her, a scalpel lodged in his throat.

John rolled onto his elbow with a mournful sound, because he knew Dinah was gone. Putting pressure on his arm made it burn, like he’d been given a thousand paper cuts. He glanced at it, but there was so much blood it was impossible to tell what was his and what wasn’t.

He had to wipe his hands on his pants before he could even attempt to reach his phone. With shaking fingers he dialed 911.

He was hanging on the line as instructed, waiting to hear the sirens, when he saw the writing on the wall.

“Dispatch,” he gasped into the phone, his voice urgent and shaky. “I need you to get a message to Detective Oliver Queen!”

\------------------------------------------

“...Dig!!”

His focus seemed to have turned inward for a moment, much to Felicity’s dismay. John’s eyes lifted to meet hers.

“When I came to in the morgue, I saw a message on the wall. Written in blood. It was one word: Queen.”

Felicity’s mouth dropped open. “CHASE was your attacker?”

John focused above her head, thinking. “He must’ve been.” He shook his head once. “He was gowned and masked, like a medical examiner. I couldn’t see most of his face. But his eyes...”

Felicity’s veins filled with ice water, remembering. “They were blue.”

“...you never forget eyes like that.”

“But...why attack you?” Felicity was gripping both his sleeves, heedless of his bandages, though he was still staring at the far wall.

“As the two leads on the case, it would be Oliver and me witnessing the autopsy. But Dinah knew he had a big date with you planned and volunteered to go instead. It was him all along,” he said softly, like he was thinking out loud.

“Him?”

“Adrian Chase was never hunting you, Felicity. We used you as bait, but you weren’t the catch...”

“John—“

Felicity’s eyes rounded in fear, finally understanding; they stared at each other for two heartbeats.

“Chase wanted Oliver. John, we have to go.”

\--------------------------------------------

They bullied the cop on their door into driving them to the precinct with the lights and sirens on. Felicity ran up the steps to the entrance, even though it made her head hurt. And her face. She didn’t even care that she hadn’t changed out of her sweats or put on concealer. Let them see. Let everyone see what had happened because they’d all made a terrible miscalculation.

Pike was just walking out of his office as they strode in; a frown knit his brow.

“What happened?”

“It wasn’t Schloman at all. It WAS Adrian Chase. He was the killer. And all this time he wanted Oliver.”

She said it in a rush, practically flinging the tablet at him with her evidence on the screen. Pike gave it a look before glancing at John and then back at her.

“What is this?”

“A delivery made to our house on the 12th.”

“What was in the box?”

“Nothing.” She was breathing hard, but not from the run.

“The box was empty?”

“Yeah.”

“How is this proof?”

Felicity stabbed the screen. “That’s Chase right there.”

Pike rolled his eyes. “We got our guy, Miss Smoak. Bobby Ray Schloman.” Her hands doubled into angry fists at her side; Dig noticed and shifted his weight her direction as Pike, oblivious, looked back at the tablet screen. “There are so few photos of Adrian Chase in your files, Agent. How can you know for sure?”

“I think he was the guy who attacked us in the morgue,” John replied, though his voice wasn’t as sure as Felicity needed it to be.

“Because...”

John swallowed. “His eyes.”

“His eyes,” Pike parroted back.

“And the writing—“ Felicity prompted, reaching blindly for Diggle’s arm.

“He wrote Oliver’s name on the wall,” John clarified. “Like he wrote “Angel”. In blood.”

Pike nodded without looking up. “Except that was Schloman, not Chase. And it could just have easily been a message from Slade Wilson’s goons, couldn’t it?”

Felicity licked her lips, desperate. This conversation was not going the way she’d imagined. “Captain Pike, I trust John. If he says it’s Chase, it’s Chase.”

“Miss Smoak, we have every reason to believe Oliver’s abduction was a retaliatory strike by Slade Wilson. That’s the lead we’re following.”

“But what if it is Chase?” She hated the pleading edge in her voice, but pushed on anyway. “Couldn’t you follow both leads?”

Pike placed a patronizing hand on her shoulder. “We recently intercepted messages being smuggled out of Iron Heights calling for Oliver’s head. They were written by Slade Wilson himself. That’s the lead we’re following.” The reiteration came with a raised eyebrow, telling her he was ending the conversation.

Felicity spun to Diggle even as Pike turned away, on to other things. “What about the FBI? Chase is your investigation.”

He nodded, already reaching for his phone. He turned away to make a call, and Felicity found herself stepping aside to be closer to Oliver’s desk. It was neat and tidy, his chair pushed in, the surface mostly bare. There was a single photo frame propped next to his monitor, a picture of the two of them on the beach in Hawaii.

The same one she kept on her desk.

She hesitated, then pulled his chair out and sat. More of a perch, really, in case somebody noticed and took offense. But the room at large buzzed with other business, other problems bigger than her. Hopefully one of those problems was Oliver and how to get him back.

She felt a touch at her shoulder and looked up to find John, his expression bleak.

“I’m not getting anywhere. They don’t want to engage.”

“What...what does that even mean?” She was standing slowly, reaching for his arm.

John ran a hand up over his face, weary, worn out, and pissed. “Oliver’s abduction is a local matter, with no bearing on any current FBI investigation.” He said it like he was reading it out of a manual.

“But Chase...”

“I don’t have any proof,” he said simply.

Felicity was seriously beginning to spiral. “But you KNOW. You know it’s Chase. Can’t they—“

“I don’t have any PROOF!”

She started, surprised by his vehemence. Conversations around them stilled as several heads turned their way. John huffed out a breath and closed his eyes, gathering himself. Felicity wrapped her arms across her middle and waited.

Not backing down, no. Waiting.

“They’re not going to help, Felicity.” It was a whisper of his deep voice. “We’re on our own.”

She gazed off his right shoulder, letting her eyes unfocus until the room full of cops and detectives blurred.

“Then we’re on our own.”

\------------------------------------------

Pike loaned them an officer to drive them to pick up their cars. It was the least he could do, he said, with a sad shake of his head. He promised Felicity they’d keep looking for Oliver, that they wouldn’t rest until they’d brought back one of their own, or some bullshit. She’d stopped listening. They were looking in the wrong place.

Back at the townhouse she stood for just a minute, collecting her thoughts. She wasn’t trained the way Diggle was; she’d have to work with what she had. Felicity tipped her head.

Which was quite a lot, actually.

She pulled up a number in her contacts and messaged it to John, then scooped up her laptop and headed for her bedroom.

“Dig, I need you to get Roy here. Call him up, I just sent you his number. Book him a flight. My credit card’s in my purse.”

She turned as she was closing the door and saw John staring at his phone.

She hacked the security cameras first, the ones outside the coroner’s office. They were blank during the time she needed. Frack. He’d gotten to them. The Chinese restaurant too, though that set up was basically a nanny cam, probably duct taped over the back door.

“When this is over I should start my own security company,” she muttered grimly.

Felicity sat and thought a minute, staring up at the wall across from their bed. In order for Chase to nab Oliver, he had to know they were going to be at that particular restaurant at that particular time. How? Bugs? Surveillance? She shook her head. The firewall around their home router was airtight; she’d built it herself. Either he was a world class hacker in his spare time, or he had one working for him.

John knocked quietly on her door to tell her he’d contacted Roy and hooked him up with a flight, though he wasn’t optimistic about the kid’s chances since he’d never even been to an airport, let alone on a plane.

“Call him back. Talk him through it,” she ordered, focus never shifting from her computer.

Once again the empty box on her kitchen table popped into her head. She unwound from her cross-legged position and hopped off the bed at a jog, sliding past John who was still in the doorway, probably questioning her sanity.

The craft knife was resting at the edge of the table where it had rolled when she’d dropped it. She picked it up and tested its weight in her hand, like she was planning on throwing it instead of performing an autopsy on a cardboard box.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

She didn’t answer immediately. “He had to have some way to monitor us.”

Dig scoffed. “With an empty box?”

Felicity lifted the knife for her first cut. “I don’t think it’s empty.”

She began with the flaps, slicing between the layers as carefully as possible, peeling them apart until she reached the seam where the body of the box began. It was a slow process; she felt John shift his weight behind her as he watched.

“This could take awhile,” she acknowledged. “Go call Roy back.”  
When all four flaps were dismantled with no result, Felicity stepped back and took a breath. This was taking a long time, time they probably didn’t have. But she still felt like she was on the right track. She dove back in.

She found it on the second side she opened. John had finished talking Roy off a ledge about getting past TSA, and was rummaging through the fridge to make them both a sandwich.

“Aha,” she said softly, when the first thin edge of something not-cardboard appeared under her knife. The rummaging sound stopped.

“You found something?”

Felicity continued to peel the cardboard apart in tiny bits, uncovering an impossibly thin circuit board. John came around the kitchen counter to watch, sliding a plate holding a sandwich for her onto the table.

“What is it?”

She pulled the last bit of it loose and held it up to the light; the whole thing was about the size of the palm of her hand. “I’d heard rumors, but I’ve never seen one until now.” She glanced at him before going back to studying it. “This is the future of spying.”

John blew out a breath. “How did Adrian Chase get his hands on it?”

“That is a good question.”

“I have another good question,” he added to her back as she held the piece of tech up to the light and turned it this way and that. Felicity hummed permission for him to go on. “Why are we bringing Roy here?”

She laid the circuit board into her palm like it was made of spun sugar. “Because we are short on manpower, for one, and Roy is very handy. He’s good at breaking in to things, and not claustrophobic, and he’s an excellent pickpocket.” She skirted around Diggle and headed down the hall, but paused to look back at him. “Plus I miss him.”

Dig tipped his head in sympathy—thinking it wasn’t only Roy she was missing—and she gave him the ghost of a smile in return.

“I’m gonna go do some research on our little friend here. You should take a nap. When does his flight get in?”

“Eight o’clock.”

Felicity heaved a world-weary sigh, exhausted but determined. “Good. That’ll give us time.”

His brow crinkled. “To do what?”

“Visit Iron Heights prison.”

\-----------------------------------------------

She’d never been to a federal prison before, and—truth be told—she was very happy to have John’s looming presence at her back as the lock buzzed loud enough to make her jump before the door ahead of them swung open automatically. He’d been able to flash his FBI credentials and get them in with very few questions; the visitor registration had been on paper, which was troublesome, because Felicity couldn’t sneak in electronically later and erase the evidence, but at least no one had picked up a phone to ask what the hell the two of them wanted with Slade Wilson.

When she’d first heard, eight months earlier, about the convicted criminal’s transfer from Hub City’s lockup to Iron Heights in Starling for the remainder of his sentence, part of her had wanted to move away, across the country, as far from him as she could get. But she and Oliver had both landed good jobs, and they were beginning to talk about looking for a permanent home, so she’d pushed her anxiety to the side and tried to put him out of her mind. Now, as she and John navigated the concrete corridors of the prison only a short drive out of the city, a kind of reluctant thankfulness crept up her chest. For Oliver’s sake.

The visiting area was as dark and unfriendly as she’d imagined it would be, perhaps a not-so gentle reminder for those on the outside to behave themselves so they could remain that way. Long low tables with metal stools on either side filled the room; it was stark and echoey and devoid of privacy. Which was also not ideal. Felicity suppressed a shudder and let Dig’s hand, pressed to the middle of her back, guide her in what to do next.

He was sitting hunched over at a table near the back of the room, his hands folded together and laying on top in full sight of the guards. At first she thought he wasn’t restrained, making her heart stop and then skitter on in panic, but as they moved closer she could see the zip tie holding his wrists together. A guard stood behind him, stance wide and thumbs in his waistband, watchful.

Felicity hadn’t had a lot of time to process this interaction, but she wasn’t surprised when it started before she’d even crossed the room. His low chuckle bounced off the walls and metal furniture and made her skin crawl.

“Hello, Angel,” he ground out, surprised, in a casual New Zealander drawl. She could almost hear him lick his lips as he watched her approach, and was grateful Dig had supervised her wardrobe choice for this visit. The dark jeans paired with an oversized sweatshirt from Oliver’s closet were both camouflage and armor as she paced forward in silent trainers. Her head was too sore for a ponytail, so her hair lay against her shoulders, combining with a careful makeup job to conceal her bruised face.

John’s hand somehow communicated through her back that she should ignore the greeting, and Slade chuckled again. Felicity resisted the urge to visibly swallow as they pulled out stools and sat. John straddled his sideways so his shoulders were turned toward her. It looked casual, until he leaned an elbow on the table and laid a long arm across the space in front of her. Protection. Felicity glanced down at the barrier he’d created, pictured it sweeping her up and out of the way if necessary, and found her voice.

“Slade.”

“Come to dance for me?”

“You know I didn’t.”

He huffed—a laugh, a tease—and waited for her to go on. Silence was Felicity’s kryptonite; she fought the urge to babble. In the hours since...it happened, a thread of terror had coiled in her stomach little by little, making a home and settling in. She pushed hands that only wanted to be fists into her lap and made her shoulders relax, desperate to scream and flail and make someone bring her Oliver NOW. But she pushed all that down and away and kept her mouth shut.

This would only work if he did all the talking.

Slade’s one good eye roamed over her openly, like she was a meal and he was starving. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of looking away. Next to her, John breathed slowly and evenly.

“I heard you’ve been dancing again.”

She almost huffed out the breath she’d been holding. There. There it was.

“A favor for a friend.”

He nodded softly, his lips slightly parted like he wanted to laugh. She thought he might look at John, might figure it out, but his eye never left her.

“Some friend.”

Felicity kept his gaze, her own mild and calm. Patient. The skin around his eye finally crinkled at the corner, curious.

“You kept yourself hidden away during my trial. Where was Oliver keeping you?”

Her tongue wanted to dart out and wet her lips, but she held it in. She’d not been entirely sure he’d even know they were together. She lifted a shoulder in the smallest shrug, and though the movement was almost lost under the expanse of Oliver’s sweatshirt, Slade’s gaze snapped there as if she’d suddenly unclipped her bra and removed it through her sleeve.

“I’m surprised Oliver isn’t here.” Slade’s single eye flicked to John and rested there a second before coming back to her. “Don’t tell me you dumped him for this guy.” He looked like he wanted to laugh again.

Across from him, shoulders held down flat and open, Felicity held his gaze without blinking. Breathing. Breathing. Breathing.  
Slade’s mocking grin slipped away.

“Where is Oliver?” he growled.

She felt John shift next to her, settling his own shoulders as the answer became clear. Across from them, Slade’s mask of self-confidence and swagger gradually morphed to anger; his eye began to blaze with fury, as he realized the prize he’d wanted to claim was no longer available. Felicity lifted her head to nod once at the guard standing watch over the prisoner; he reached out a hand and nudged Slade’s shoulder not quite gently.

Time to go.

They rose together, Felicity and Diggle, turning away without meeting Slade’s eye again. Felicity fought the urge to pick up the pace as they walked away, letting John’s hand on her back determine their speed. Behind them, a scrape of metal on concrete let them know the prisoner was standing too, and maybe just realizing he’d been tricked into giving them information. The grumbled mutterings of his rusty accent rose to a shout as they passed through the doorway.

“WHERE IS OLIVER QUEEN?!”

\---------------------------------------------

She kept her silence in the car, her head tipped against the window and her eyes closed to ward off the glare of sunset as John drove them away from the prison.

“How did you know?”

“Mmm?”

“That he’d tell you if you kept quiet?”

“I had to know if he was aware Oliver’s been kidnapped. If I’d asked outright, he would’ve lied.”

John huffed out a breath and turned the wheel with just the palm of his hand to steer them into the drive thru lane of a Big Belly Burger. “If you ever want a career change, the FBI could use you.”

She was flattered, but didn’t say so.

He ordered them both burgers and fries, eating his with one hand on the wheel as they cruised up the interstate to the airport exit.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said softly, her small hand in her box of fries.

“Do what?”

“Help me find him. They’ll be expecting you at work.”

He turned his head to give her a look before focusing back on the road. His big shoulders shrugged once. “I have vacation time I should use.”

She looked up from her fries and their eyes caught and held in understanding. Felicity nodded and John went back to watching the road.

“You have a job, too. Can you get away?”

She swallowed her bite. “I have a few days. But I can get more. I’ll use family medical leave if I have to.” Her gaze was drawn out the window. “Medical records for FMLA paperwork aren’t hard to fabricate.”

Beside her, John sighed deeply. “You can do—“ He cut his own question off after glancing at the wiggling fingers she was holding up. “Of course you can do that. Jesus, Felicity.”

She didn’t bother looking guilty.

Neither of them spoke again until Felicity got Roy’s arrival text from their spot in the cell phone parking lot. He was waiting for them at the curb outside Arrivals, a bag that looked like an old Army duffel hefted onto his shoulder and tension in his eyes.

“Still wearing the red hoodie,” Diggle muttered as they pulled up.

Felicity had her door open before he’d brought the car to a complete stop, crashing into Roy for a hug hard enough to make him stagger back a step. Dig rounded the back of the car for the duffel, squeezing the younger man’s shoulder since Roy had his hands full holding on to Felicity.

They filled him in on the drive; Roy sat forward in the middle of the back seat, ignoring his seatbelt, and absorbed their story with very little commentary, except to mention casually that the car smelled like Big Belly.

Dig huffed a sigh and pulled in to the next one they passed.

The townhouse was filling up; Felicity led the way to show Roy to the pullout couch in the basement, then disappeared into her bedroom to collect her thoughts. Oliver had now been gone a little over 24 hours; Pike claimed to have the SCPD fully engaged in the search, and if the FBI wasn’t interested in using the Adrian Chase lead, they were at least in the early stages of interest in the Slade Wilson angle, and even help on a wild goose chase was worth getting. From her spot on the bed, Felicity could hear John’s muffled voice through the door, talking to someone he thought he might convince.

She dropped her face into her palms—careful of her swollen cheekbone—and breathed in and out slowly, missing Oliver like an amputation. The last time he’d touched her had been the previous morning, so she thought about that, reconstructing in her mind the feel of his hand against her back as he pulled her close, his other palming the back of her head beneath her ponytail as he angled his lips to meet hers in a soft kiss. For a guy who loved guns and sports and sweaty, manly workouts, he was so incredibly soft with her. No one he worked with would be able to imagine the love notes he left for her in random spots around the house, or the flowers he picked on the cool down lap of his long runs and left on his pillow for her to find when she woke to the sound of his morning shower. She was already missing the every day Oliver: the way he wrinkled his nose at her tv shows, and saved her the crispy bits at the bottom of his fry box. The way he was always up first on the weekends and trying to be as quiet as possible while making way more breakfast than it was possible to eat. God, she missed him.

Felicity swiped a tear out from under her glasses and pulled her laptop closer, thinking again of the tech hidden in that cardboard box. It hadn’t been manufactured by a company, and sourcing the parts had been mostly fruitless; this was truly a custom job. She fiddled with modifying a program she already had to try analyzing it, but so far it wasn’t giving her much to go on other than it was a remote router, slipped inside her security like a Trojan Horse. Time was passing as she sat working a single thread in this whole web; soon she’d have to choose a course and go, because probability said Oliver was running out of time. Tension and fear made a knot in her stomach.

She was skimming code when something caught her eye; she blinked once and went back to find it, feeling a nibble of recognition at the back of her brain. She’d seen that irregularity before recently, but where? Her eye caught it again and she breathed in sharply, remembering. She opened a tab and went to the security company’s website and its Meet Our Associates page.

It was faster getting in the back door of the site the second time, especially since she’d left a few breadcrumbs too small to incriminate her in case she ever needed to get back. Buried in the code of the Associates page she found it again: that same quirk that made one line stand out like a birthmark, a unique feature tied to a specific programmer.

Felicity sat back with a whoosh of air, surprise robbing her of actual speech, because Bobby Ray Schloman’s employment info HAD been doctored on the website, either altered or dropped in to make his story work out. And the same person who’d done that had created the delicate piece of tech delivered to their door inside a cardboard box.

The knot of tension in her stomach flared up, because there were less than a handful of programmers she knew of who were capable of creating tech like this, an even smaller number who were willing to create it for illegal purposes. Her phone sat silent and dark next to her knee; she could probably call and get some information, but even that wouldn’t get her far enough.

She climbed off the bed feeling a hundred years old, pausing just before she turned the doorknob to press her forehead against the door: the price she would have to pay to find Oliver had just revealed itself.

John was on the couch, staring in thought at his phone. Roy appeared from the kitchen as she came down the hall; he froze when he saw her, as if she’d just missed catching him stuffing cookies in his pockets. She probably had. Felicity stopped in front of John’s bent head and waited.

He knew as soon as he saw her expression; his own face stilled in concern. “Felicity? What did you find?”

“I think I know who’s helping Chase with his IT.” She took a shaky breath and blew it out slowly. “We need to go to Las Vegas.”

\----------------------------------------------

The diner in the truck stop had not been great, but he’d picked it for its huge parking lot, not the food. After all that driving it was nice to stretch his legs and feel the evening breeze ruffle his hair. The sun had set an hour before, but the sky on the western horizon was still a medium shade of blue, darkening to a deep navy directly overhead. Even twenty miles inland, there was a sense the ocean was near.

He’d left the car at the back of the parking lot, out past the rows of tractor trailers parked for the night with just their running lights on. He’d given his passenger another dose of tranquilizer at a rest stop several hours before, but he didn’t like taking chances. Out here, near the limits of the asphalt parking lot, the only people who might hear thumping from inside were the Lot Lizards trading favors for cash from the truckers, and nobody ever listened to them.

A stronger gust of wind battered his face for a moment, so he stopped to tip his head back and close his eyes, savoring the feel of freedom and success. What a time to be alive. He was only a few yards from the car now, though it was little more than a darker shadow amongst shadows at the edge of the traveler’s oasis. When he was close enough, he reached out his hand and rapped his knuckles on the lid of the trunk in a jaunty rhythm. He felt good.

Adrian Chase started the engine and drove away into the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bad News/Good News time:  
> Yes, this is the end of Part 2, but Part 3 is already fleshed out. I need to clear my head and tie up a couple endings to other WIPs, and then I’ll be back with Avenging Angel to finish out the series. (Our girl’s gonna kick some ass.)  
> The song for this ending is Magic, by Bruce Springsteen.   
> Thanks, as always, for the love! *blows kisses*


End file.
